Inequity in Education: A Historical Perspective

Inequity in Education

Inequity in Education A Historical Perspective Edited by Debra Meyers and Burke Miller

LEXINGTON BOOKS A Division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Inequity in education : a historical perspective / edited by Debra Meyers and Burke Miller. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-3397-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-3399-6 (electronic) 1. Educational equalization—United States—History. 2. Education—Social aspects—United States—History. I. Meyers, Debra, 1956- II. Miller, Burke, 1964LC213.2I435 2009 379.2’60973—dc22

2009023171

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Contents

Introduction

1

Burke Miller

1

The Unequal Status of Children in American Educational History: Historiographical Reflections and Theoretical Possibilities

11

Joshua Garrison

2

In Their Words: The Right to Control One’s Learning

26

The Cornerstone of the Republic: George Washington and the National University

35

Ryan Staude

3

In Their Words: A National University

50

No Acknowledged Standard: The Female Seminary Curriculum of the Early Nineteenth Century

55

Emily Conroy-Krutz

4

In Their Words: The Troy Female Seminary and Curriculum

69

The Training an Orphan Requires: Education in Nineteenth-Century New York City Orphan Asylums

79

Sarah Mulhall Adelman

In Their Words: Education in the Orphans Home and Asylum v

92

vi

5

Contents

The Idea of Integration in the Age of Horace Mann

101

Chris Beneke

6

In Their Words: Charles Sumner Argues School Equality

115

The Race Problem and American Education in the Early Twentieth Century

123

Tracy L. Steffes

7

In Their Words: First Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question, 1890

141

Vocational Education, Work Culture, and the Children of European Immigrants during the 1930s

147

Ivan Greenberg

8

In Their Words: Max Weber

159

The “Separate but Equal” Schools of Monongalia County, West Virginia’s Coal Mining Communities

165

Connie Park Rice

9

In Their Words: African American Students in WPA Schools

175

Christian Day Schools and the Transformation of Conservative Evangelical Protestant Educational Activism, 1962–1990

183

Adam Laats

10

In Their Words: Prayer and Bible in Public Schools

201

The Austin T.E.A. Party: Homeschooling Controversy in Texas, 1986–1994

211

Ryan McIlhenny

11

In Their Words: The Houston Chronicle, June 16, 1994

226

Changing Visions for Jesuit High Schools in America: The Case of Campion Jesuit High School, 1965–1975

235

Casey C. Beaumier

12

In Their Words: Document on Christian Education (Gravissimum Edeucationis), October 28, 1965

248

The National Education Association: Champion of Equality in Education or Roadblock to Change?

251

Jennifer Heth

In Their Words: “Woman’s Work in Education,” 1885

263

Index

269

About the Contributors

275

Introduction Burke Miller

A

group of religious leaders met in Cambridge, Massachusetts during a hot summer in 1648 to discuss the lack of discipline within their congregations. While the group lamented the religious commitment of their followers, a large snake slithered into the hall scattering those unfortunate enough to be standing in the doorway. Reaching the elders’ bench toward the front of the hall, William Thompson smashed the serpent’s head with his boot. The Puritan leaders, including Governor John Winthrop who recorded the event in his journal, saw the true significance of this reptile invasion. In the minds of these Puritans, the “ould deluder, Satan,” took the shape of the serpent to create yet another “disturbance” as a means to achieve his ultimate goal—to crush the great Puritan efforts to create a godly “city upon a hill” as a religious beacon for the world. In an effort to thwart the devil’s evil plan to “keepe men from the knowledge of the Scriptures” and divert them from the path of righteousness, the Massachusetts General Court enacted a series of education laws. The plan for resistance was relatively simple. Each town with at least fifty families would support a teacher responsible for basic literacy and larger towns, with more than one hundred families, would support a grammar school to prepare the most promising scholars for college.1 Despite this early adoption of a pre-modern public education system, most English settlers depended on the traditional system of family education that they had carried with them across the Atlantic. Parents taught 1

2

Introduction

their children the alphabet, sent them to petty schools for reading, and paid for advanced studies in grammar schools.2 The earliest educational efforts in the English colonies emerged in Virginia, where plans for a free school and college were lost after a devastating Native American attack in 1622.3 However, sporadic efforts continued throughout the region: two endowed free schools in Virginia in 1635 and 1642, a 1694 Maryland free-school law, a 1710 Charleston, South Carolina school, and a few community “old field schools” built on exhausted farm lands. Despite these examples, no systematic movement for education developed in the southern English colonies.4 Multiple factors slowed communal education in the southern colonies. Agricultural patterns coupled with high mortality rates and a reliance on slave and indentured labor generally stunted the growth of dense settlements and accompanying communal activity, including public schooling. Thus, few inducements to public education existed for the poor, while wealthy families either sent their children to England or hired European tutors.5 Broad-based access to public education outside of New England emerged haphazardly in the form of charity schools. Generally established by missionary organizations, charity schools typically addressed a more diverse student population including poor white children, African Americans and Native Americans. Supported by the Anglican Church, the Society for Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts championed missionary and educational initiatives for Native Americans and white settlers throughout the mid-Atlantic and southern English colonies. Dissenting religious groups, such as the Moravians, Quakers, and Jesuits, also established missions and schools in Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia. However, charity schools suffered from two impediments. First, they were reliant on uncertain funding sources that often disappeared as mission initiatives changed. Second, some groups rejected charity efforts out of hand. For example, when the Pennsylvania legislature attempted to integrate German migrants in the 1750s by offering free education, some responded negatively because “free schools smacked of charity.” Such sentiments resounded throughout the cosmopolitan, mid-Atlantic settlements.6 Educational practice in the Middle colonies reflected the ethnic and religious diversity of the region. Baptists, Dutch Reformed, Lutherans, Mennonites, Moravians, Quakers, and other sects feared indoctrination within Puritan or Anglican schools, while Danes, Dutch, French, Germans, and Swedes wanted native language instruction for their children. As a result, education varied widely from one settlement and region to another. For instance, the Dutch West India Company financed a school in New Amsterdam in 1638, and by 1664 eleven of the other twelve settle-

Introduction

3

ments also supported public efforts. In Pennsylvania, Quaker schools reflected the regional diversity by admitting any student, including Blacks, Native Americans, and females. And in the growing commercial centers along the Atlantic coast, private groups incorporated to establish a variety of school options to meet the interests of a growing commercial culture. For example, the William Penn Charter School became the flagship of Quaker schools, eventually developing into a campus with elementary, Latin, and English schools. Further west, in Neshaminy, Pennsylvania, the revivalist George Tennant built his “Log College,” a Latin school that prepared ministers for their community roles. Its establishment prompted the creation of similar institutions throughout the region. Although by 1700 each of the Middle colonies boasted multiple schools, no publicly funded system developed. Before that time, only New England supported such efforts.7 The relative homogeneity of Puritan settlement accelerated the rise of communal education in their New England colonies. Four shared characteristics—language, literacy, socioeconomic standing, and religious indoctrination—imbued New Englanders with a common purpose that inextricably connected religion with literacy.8 Since Satan’s efforts to win souls through ignorance could only be countered with education, learning became a community necessity. The Massachusetts General Court formalized that imperative in 1642 by requiring children to read well enough to understand religious dogma and capital laws. Additionally, parents were assigned legal responsibility for teaching their children, and they actively sought alternatives if they lacked the ability or time to do so. Five years later the “Old Deluder Satan” act required towns to provide alternatives in the form of schools.9 The town schools that emerged throughout New England in the 1650s shared several characteristics. Colonial laws required towns to offer schools for those who chose to attend and could demonstrate some mastery of the alphabet. Despite no exclusionary language in the earliest laws, towns intended their schools to serve only white males. Although some females were permitted to attend, their numbers were never great and they actually decreased with time. In small schools with uncertain academic term lengths, rapid teacher turnover, shifting student attendance, and varying degrees of student preparation, ability, and interest, schoolmasters rarely accomplished more than a rudimentary education of reading and writing through memorization of moral lessons. Typically, the early curriculum began with a hornbook and progressed to psalters, catechisms, and the Bible itself. Two works served as early curriculum guides: Edmund’s Coote’s The English School-Master, an import popular with teachers trained abroad, and John Cotton’s Spiritual Milk for American Babes, an alternative New England publication. By the late

4

Introduction

seventeenth century, the New England Primer had become standard fare in town schools.10 The best students, whose means and achievements set them on course to attend college, progressed to a Latin, or grammar, school. The Boston Latin School, established in 1635, was the first school of this sort built in America. With the creation of Harvard a year later, grammar schools proliferated as more students sought college preparatory training. Their curriculums tended to include the study of the Greek and Latin languages with some arithmetic. Most grammar schools were funded through the tuition paid by wealthy families and endowments, often in the form of land, to subsidize poorer scholars. Sometimes multiple towns or sections of towns jointly supported a grammar school. For example, when the town council of Falmouth, Massachusetts voted to support a school, they decided to rotate the school “from place to place so as to give all parts benefit.” By the late-seventeenth century, town and grammar schools reflected the nature of colonial society by preparing white male students for participation in the public world and excluding virtually everyone else.11 Although colonial governments demonstrated the interest and power to legislate education, no colony established compulsory attendance or sustained public funding. Only a minority of children attended regularly, and, even in New England, opportunities were limited. As a result, parents sought alternative means for educating their children. While public education continued to focus on preparing white males for future religious and civic duty, the types of schools and the means for funding them became more entrepreneurial in nature, and student enrollments became more inclusive. These new endeavors offered a wider variety of learning options, including alternative classical studies, vocational training, and increased opportunities for females.12 Dame schools, taught by women in their homes, emerged as one of the earliest alternatives to the New England model. Since education began in homes, literate women, especially mothers, taught their children to read. A logical step for many women, especially those seeking additional income, was to instruct neighborhood children for a small fee. Many dame schools began as an early form of childcare, but most gradually adopted a basic curriculum of reading, domestic skills, and moral behavior. Learning the alphabet, often through a hornbook, constituted the primary academic goal. The private or semi-public nature of these schools enabled access to education that town schools limited. By the end of the seventeenth century, dame schools became a common option for preparatory education, offering several advantages over town schools. First, they allowed both female and male students to attend, typically serving as the only formal educational option for females. Second, in many cases, dame schools offered greater stability because their tuition base allowed for

Introduction

5

longer and more frequent terms. During the eighteenth century, as more females sought and acquired formal training, many traditional dame schools became “women’s schools,” in which women taught both male and female students during the summer season. Eventually, summer schools expanded to full terms. Thus, in many respects, dame schools rather than town schools represent the origins of modern elementary education. 13 Other lucrative private institutions known as “venture” or “adventure” schools dominated the colonial urban centers, including those in New England. Often established by individual teachers as moneymaking enterprises, they remained outside town, district, or church control. Beholden to tuition fees, venture schools accepted a wider variety of students and offered courses to meet their demands. Most offered literacy or college preparatory skills focused on advanced reading, writing, and grammar as well as mathematics, geography, Greek, Latin, philosophy, and rhetoric. Many included more specific skills, often vocational in nature, needed for engineering, accounting, navigating, and surveying occupations while others provided training in the “ornamental accomplishments” of music, dancing, art, needlework and handicrafts. Until the 1780s, these schools were the only means for advanced training outside of a college, and they remained the sole providers of vocational training. In the mid-1700s, venture schools became the primary locus for educating female teens who had moved beyond the summer curriculum.14 Academies differed from ventures schools in two significant ways. First, they typically incorporated, operating under the auspices of a board of trustees who acquired land and facilities, supported fundraising efforts, hired teachers, and established examination policies. Second, incorporation offered improved fundraising which meant more stability than venture schools. However, they also retained important similarities: a wider curriculum and more student diversity. With the increased popularity of academies and venture schools, grammar schools broadened their curricula. Progress in both the availability of educational institutions and curricular opportunities paved the way for additional advances toward a modern public school system. Simultaneously, as colonists embraced a revolutionary ideology that would ultimately lead to independence, they increasingly valued a rational, virtuous citizenry that required higher levels of education.15 By the 1770s, alternatives to the New England model existed in every colony, offering educational and social opportunity that captured much of the revolutionary spirit. Independence brought new state constitutions which, during the more radical 1770s, included specific mention of educational establishments in at least seven states: Delaware, Georgia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and

6

Introduction

Vermont. However, the unstable nature of many new governments meant that educational practice remained uncertain. Pennsylvania, for example, in the 1780s, replaced its initial plan for a common school system with one that guaranteed free education for the poor only. Most other states followed suit. Even Thomas Jefferson’s 1779 plan for education in Virginia failed to gain acceptance.16 During the economic miseries of the early 1780s, American fears of a powerful central authority extended to most government provisions, including education. Although the Articles of Confederation government proved ineffective in dealing with many economic and political problems, passage of the 1785 Land Ordinance did set public education on its future course. In addition to establishing policies for the survey and distribution of new lands, the act also set aside one out of every thirty-six parcels for the support of public education. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 further encouraged the growth of public schools as “necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind.” Although the land set aside rarely amounted to much money, the importance of publicly-funded schools became a fixture among future states and reformers.17 Reminiscent of the Puritan belief in the transformative power of education for religious purposes, nineteenth-century reformers looked to promote American greatness. By instilling republican spirit through a set of “American” values, middle-class activists hoped to initiate the “Novus Ordo Seclorum,” a new order for the ages. Reformers supported numerous efforts to “improve” the nation: revivalism, abolition, prohibition, and education. Such thinking coalesced into Horace Mann’s “common school” movement that provided a new paradigm for inclusive public education. Still, this new paradigm alienated a multitude of groups.18 Rather than detail the full history of American education, this volume attempts to highlight some of the difficulties that underserved groups have faced, to provide a glimpse into the important issues that have defined its evolution, and to explore the historical foundations of problems facing our schools today. Although the chapters are presented chronologically, readers may not necessarily want to follow them in order. Some may gain greater insight by reading entries topically, making connections between essays, primary sources, and study questions provided for each chapter. The first chapter, by Josh Garrison, introduces key arguments concerning the relationship between “unequal children” and American education. For those readers without a foundation in the history of education, he establishes a framework for most of the ensuing chapters. Looking beyond Washington’s political and military achievements, Ryan Staude, in chapter 2, examines plans for establishing a national university as a means for promoting republican values and ideals. In some ways the university plan represented the state of American education and society after the

Introduction

7

Revolution: elitist, sexist, and focused on preparing young, white men for life in the public arena. As important as describing the national university plan itself, Staude illustrates the limits of educational thought. The limits of education have been argued for centuries, with no more volatile issue emerging than the integration of ethnic and racial groups into public school systems. Chris Beneke, in his chapter about Horace Mann, argues that integration, broadly conceived, was at the heart of common school movement from the early nineteenth century. Middleclass reformers then, as now, argued the logic and means for teaching students of different races, genders, religions, and classes. By the turn of the century, according to Tracy Steffes, communities argued about a “race problem” and found in education a popular, but contested, solution that could alternately liberate underserved groups or preserve the status quo. In the late-1930s, schools funded by the Works Progress Administration offered equal facilities for African Americans, but, as Connie Rice argues, real change emerged in West Virginia only when African American parents, educators and leaders pressured the county into providing “equal” facilities in segregated communities. Other chapters by Adelman, Beaumier, Greenberg, and Laats, consider the impact of race on issues of female curriculum, private religious schooling, and vocational training. “Proper” curriculum may represent the most significant historical argument concerning female education. In her chapter, Emily Conroy-Krutz argues against a “separate spheres” interpretation of education by offering the female seminary as a model that evolved for white, middle-class women within the male world of market economies and politics. Other chapters, including those by Adelman, Beaumier, Beneke, and Steffes, connect middle-class notions about female education to other efforts at integrating schools. Middle-class notions drove educational thought through the nineteenth century and beyond. As Beneke’s Horace Mann championed the common-school movement, the education of poor and working-class children became a central issue. Adelman suggests that between 1830 and 1890 asylum managers’ decisions to educate poor orphans in asylums, rather than in the public school system, reflected their belief that discipline, order, and religion were more essential than academic training for their marginalized dependents. Two decades later the 1917 Smith-Hughes Act—mandating federal aid for vocational education—expanded vocational opportunities throughout industrial America. Ivan Greenberg’s chapter on Bridgeport, Connecticut offers a case study of its impact on students from working-class families and public education in general. Finally, religion continues to play a prominent role in American education. From early curricula based on religious texts, to Protestantdriven reform movements of the early Republic, to current debates about

8

Introduction

vouchers, school prayer, evolution, and the Ten Commandments, several chapters trace the antecedents and current significance of religion in schools. Casey Beaumier considers how visionary changes within the Society of Jesus, the Roman Catholic Church, and American culture, contributed to the rapid decline and eventual collapse of Campion High School in Wisconsin. Two chapters focus on Protestant fundamentalists: Adam Laats arguing that Protestant fundamentalists have transformed themselves from a dominant cultural group to a competing educational interest group and Ryan McIlhenny analyzing keys to the homeschool movement’s success. Jennifer Heth completes this volume by examining the disputed nature of National Education Association objectives and the organization’s role in promoting classroom equity. Her argument reflects four centuries of educational evolution in which multiple groups have struggled for access to public education, and have done so in ways that altered the fundamental nature of the system. Although we no longer segregate public-school students by gender, race, religion, or class, current debates on similar topics—achievement gaps, voucher programs, charter schools, and equity initiatives—continue to dominate educational discussions.

NOTES 1. John Winthrop, The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 342; see also, Charles Francis Adams, History of Braintree, Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1891), 15–19, and David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment (New York: Knopf, 1989), 92; for text of the Massachusetts education laws, see Education in the United States: A Documentary History, ed. Sol Cohen (New York: Random House, 1973), 1:393–5; for the relationship between literacy and religious belief, see Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960); for a comprehensive treatment of education history in the United States, see Wayne J. Urban and Jennings L. Wagoner, American Education, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009). 2. David Hawke, The Colonial Experience (Indianapolis and New York: BobbsMerrill, 1966), 293; in England, petty schools were also known as dame schools, see Jena Brink, “Literacy and Education,” in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), 98–102; for a more general discussion of cultural ties to England, see David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication Between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: University Press, 1987), 223–34. 3. Although beyond the scope of this chapter, Catholic mission schools existed in Florida and New Mexico before 1607, see Ted Morgan, Wilderness at Dawn: The Settling of the North American Continent (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 88, 100, and Mary Ross, “The Restoration of the Spanish Missions in Georgia,

Introduction

9

1598–1606,” Georgia Historical Quarterly, v. 10, 1926, 171–99, in Urban and Wagoner, 7–13; David Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 105. 4. Urban and Wagoner, 21–2, 28–34; for additional information about informal schooling in a southern colony see Debra Meyers, Common Whores, Vertuous Women, and Loveing Wives (Indiana University Press, 2003) chapters 4 and 6. 5. For more information about slave education, see E. Jennifer Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 241–272; Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1980), 258–62. 6. H. G. Good, A History of American Education (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 39–40; Stuart Noble, A History of American Education, revised edition (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1970), 70–2; Urban and Wagoner, 24–33; Monaghan, 143–165; quote in Hawke, 484. 7. Although the Penn Charter School admitted students of different creeds, the curriculum retained its essential religious nature. R. Freeman Butts, Public Education in the United States: from Revolution to Reform (New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1978), 4–5; Lawrence Cremin, Traditions of American Education (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 20–2; Urban and Wagoner, 54–5. 8. Urban and Wagoner, 34–45; for the connection between literacy, religious belief, and education, see Kenneth Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York: Norton, 1974). 9. For the East Anglian influence on Puritanism, see Urban and Wagoner, 38; Good, 29–30, 41; Monaghan, 19–45. 10. On the early education of females in New England, see Walter Small, American Education: Its Men, Ideas and Institutions (New York: Arno Press, 1969), chapter 11; Noble, 23–9; Bruce Daniels, Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995), 28; Urban and Wagoner, 45–50. 11. Small, 46, 58–61, chapter 3 described these “moving schools”; Edgar Knight, Education in the United States, 3rd ed. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), 108– 114; Robert Middelkauf, Ancients and Axioms: Secondary Education in EighteenthCentury New England (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1963), 13–23; Noble, 69; several attempts were made to establish Latin schools in Virginia during the 1630s, see Good, 52. 12. Small, chapter 7; also, Small suggested that towns often paid a fine in preference to actually supporting a grammar school, 55; historians of education have reached no consensus on the origins of our modern, public system; for example, see the following: Edwin Slossen, The American Spirit In Education (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921), 1–6; Knight, 104–6; and John Rury, Education and Social Change, 2nd ed., (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005), 33. 13. David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Schools (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 16–21; Small, chapter 6, especially, 176–85; Good 37; Knight 120–1; Norton 257; Daniels, 28. 14. Good 66–9; Tyack, 25; Norton, 259–60.

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15. Urban and Wagoner, 241–3, Knight suggests that academies replaced grammar schools for most Americans, 114–5. 16. Butts, 14–5; Good 88–9. 17. Butts, 16–7; Good 90–1; for the lack of initial educational success in the Northwest Territory, see Andrew Cayton, Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825 (Kent, OH: Kent State University, 1989), 142–5. 18. Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 3–12.

1 ✛

The Unequal Status of Children in American Educational History: Historiographical Reflections and Theoretical Possibilities Joshua Garrison

T

he publication of Bernard Bailyn’s Education in the Forming of American Society (1960) signaled the “opening salvo in the intellectual and ideological debate over the changes needed in the analysis of the role of education in the development of the United States.”1 Bailyn’s introductory comments in Education in the Forming of American Society were blistering. Himself a historian of early America, Bailyn held educational historians in disdain and did not consider them to be bona fide scholars situated within the larger tradition of historical scholarship; rather, he saw them as a “powerful academic ecclesia” that worked in “almost total isolation from the major influences and shaping minds of twentieth-century historiography.”2 This was a history, wrote Bailyn, penned by “educational missionaries of the turn of the century derived directly from their professional interests.”3 This wasn’t history at all, which, according to Bailyn, was a discipline that should “describe the dawning of ideas and the creation of forms—surprising, strange, and awkward then, however familiar they may have become since—in response to the changing demands of circumstance.”4 Instead, the “history” of education was merely a celebratory performance: “A subject that could give the neophyte an everlasting faith in his profession.”5 Thus, the history of education was depicted as a corrupted discipline, removed from “real” history and subservient to the educational establishment. 11

12

Chapter 1

Just five years after the publication of Bailyn’s critique, Lawrence Cremin—an educational historian at Columbia Teachers College—certified Bailyn’s thesis and provided it with the disciplinary blessing it needed to impact work being conducted within colleges of education. Cremin had by that time become the most prominent educational historian in America, having earned the prestigious Bancroft Prize for his treatment of progressive education in The Transformation of the School. Cremin’s subsequent work, a historiographical essay entitled The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley reiterated many of Bailyn’s concerns. According to Cremin, early historical undertakings, such as essays printed in Henry Barnard’s Journal of Education and Amory Dwight Mayo’s histories that appeared in the U.S. Bureau of Education reports during the 1890s, had been inspirational and uncritical endeavors that aimed to bolster the status of the educational profession by demonstrating the good-natured and democratic roots of schooling in the United States. These writings may have generated a deeper understanding of educational history, but subsequent works had not: “The moral of educational history is the common school triumphant, and with it the republic,” wrote Cremin. “The mold had been cast, and after Mayo, few would venture to depart from it.”6 Interestingly, the critiques leveled by Bailyn and Cremin sound very much like the one issued by Jurgen Herbst decades later: educational historians were stuck in a historiographical tradition that was no longer relevant, creative, or particularly useful. Foreshadowing Herbst, Cremin noted that among his peers “there has been no overall thinking of our educational history in response to the revisionist currents in more general historiography since 1919.”7 Combined, these critiques raise two important questions: first, how did the revisionist historians of the 1960s and 1970s rescue their discipline from the educational “ecclesia”? And second, how might contemporary historians reenergize a field that, in Herbst’s words, is punctuated by “a sense of dismay and unease . . . [and] lacks a sense of direction and purpose”?8 The revival of educational history in the late 1960s and early 1970s cannot be understood without reference to the social and political context in which the “new” historians were writing. These educational historians— Michael B. Katz, Joel Spring, Clarence J. Karrier, Paul Violas, and Colin Greer, to name some of the most prominent members of movement— were deeply influenced by the revolutionary and activist climate that permeated the times. Indeed, one of the most damaging critiques leveled against these scholars was that their analysis was too heavily influenced, if not determined, by the day’s radical mood. The revisionists’ reading of history, wrote Diane Ravitch, was overly politicized and, worse, they committed the methodological error of reading the past through the lens of the present. As Diane Ravitch wrote in 1977,

The Unequal Status of Children in American Educational History

13

Politicization has many risks, the greatest of which is that it frequently forces a telescoping and distortion of the past for the sake of explaining the present. The presentist method involves projecting one’s own ideas onto the past in search of the seeds of the present problems. The more passionate the seeker, the likelier he is to treat the past as a precursor of the great goodness or the great evil of the present, rather than on its own terms.9

There is no doubt that the radical revisionists were passionate, and they most certainly were alarmed by the problems of the times: civil rights, government policies that did not represent the people’s interests, widening economic disparities, the educational achievement gap and the glaring inadequacies of ghetto schools, and the burgeoning youth rights movement. These scholars were not only concerned about the hypocrisies evident in the American social and political order, but they hoped that their analyses of the country’s educational past would usher in an age of reform. In Schooling in Capitalist America, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis suggested that equality required a drastic restructuring of political and economic institutions: “Only in such a revolutionary framework,” they wrote, “can the schools fulfill what we take to be their tripartite goal: the fostering of social equality, the promotion of the full development of creative potentialities of youth, and the integration of new generations into the social order.”10 But Bowles and Gintis’ “revolution,” while certainly radical, was not fueled by a logic that was extremist—indeed, in many ways, their vision was distinctly American. Educational thinkers from Horace Mann on had conceived of public education as a way to foster and enhance social, economic, and political equality; through a free and universal system of public schooling, all Americans, without regard to race, class, or creed, would be afforded all the benefits and opportunities that came with American citizenship. Indeed, even the most conservative of educational historians, writing before the revisionist critique, envisioned education in Mann’s terms: “the great equalizer of the conditions of men—the balance wheel of the social machinery.”11 The values of early and conservative historians like Ellwood Cubberley—a Stanford University professor and frequent target of the revisionist’s ire—were not so different from those of the radical scholars. Writing in 1919, Cubberley placed educational equality at the center of his historical analysis: Another principle which we have firmly established in our educational policy is that the schools provided shall afford not only equal opportunity for all in any one class or division of the school, but also that full opportunity for promising youths to rise shall be offered by the State, and that this opportunity, as well, shall be equally free and open to all. In other words, we decided early, as a part of the great democratic movement in the early part

14

Chapter 1 of the nineteenth century, that we would institute a thoroughly democratic school system, and not in any way copy the aristocratic and monarchical two-class school systems of European states.12

For the first wave of revisionist historians such as Bailyn and Cremin, Cubberely epitomized the problem with educational historiography: it had been a discipline written by self-promoting schoolmen who were so tightly bound to educational institutions and professional interests that they seemed unable to take a critical, or even realistic, view of educational history. But Bailyn and Cremin were not necessarily offended by Cubberely’s unshakeable faith in the essentially democratic nature of the schools; instead, they were more troubled by his narrow and institutionbound definition of education. Both encouraged academics to expand their definitions of education and, in the process, move beyond a schoolcentered approach to educational history. Bailyn, for instance, urged educational historians to conceive of education as “the entire process by which a culture transmits itself across the generations,” a logic Cremin adopted for his massive, three-volume study of American educational history.13 Many historians, however, were unsatisfied with the Bailyn-Cremin project. One critic, writing in the pages of the History of Educational Quarterly, scoffed at the breadth of Bailyn’s definition: “Apparently, then, the history of education would be the history of civilization.” Further, he wrote, “if we are going to approach the history of education from the perspective of socialization or enculturation, how, then, is the role of a historian of education different from that of a historian in general?” “What the historian of education taking this broader approach does not seem to realize,” he concluded, “is that he has interpreted himself out of a job.”14 Likewise, Sol Cohen, another historian of education, took issue with the almost impossible demands issued by the thesis of education and enculturalization. Cremin, he complained, had not written the history of American education, but the history of American culture; it was, in Cohen’s words, “a kind of anti-history of education.”15 The radical revisionists, on the other hand, were not troubled by Cubberely’s institutional myopia—indeed, their work would focus almost entirely on schools. They were, however, deeply distressed by his somewhat gullible and unsophisticated democratic idealism, and this signaled their departure from Bailyn and Cremin. In fact, as Cohen notes, the radical revisionists criticized Cremin and Cubberley on the same grounds: “The radical revisionists challenged everything [Cremin] stood for, not only his commitment to liberalism in politics and his progressive emplotment of educational historiography but to civility in discourse.”16 Ironically,

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added Cohen, Cremin “was always afraid of being pegged as a latter-day Ellwood P. Cubberley.”17 The radical revisionists thought that Cubberley and Cremin’s mistake had been holding to the belief that the democratic and egalitarian rhetoric of early school reformers had been genuine. In The Great School Legend, Colin Greer wrote, “To interpret rhetorical good intensions as actual values, to regard them as actual priorities, is to read and judge a society quite sympathetically. But it is not very good history or sociology.”18 Greer attacked pre-revisionist historiography as “pernicious legend” based on “misguided faith”; it was propagandistic, overly pious, and parochial.19 That schools promoted opportunity and equality was, for Geer, a “legend” that was patently false; neither the historical record, nor the contemporary educational situation on the ground, supported such claims. “If the rosy picture were true,” wrote Greer, we would see urban children being reminded over and over that they inhabit a learning environment dedicated to their own respective ambitions in a wider social setting, becoming more and more democratic and less and less class-conscious in ways that predetermine the success or failure of children. . . . Such schools would all be equally well equipped with facilities, materials, and services, and they would be supervised by teachers dedicated to completing the alleged historic mission of the American public schools: a constant redistribution, on increasingly more egalitarian ground, of the human and material comforts of an open democracy.20

For Greer and other radical revisionists, however, this had clearly not happened, and it became their mission to explain, through the reexamination of educational history, why gross inequalities persisted amidst a rhetorical pledge to democratic and egalitarian principles. It is true that the radical revisionists’ commitment to social justice was a product of their times. But Ravitch and other critics of the revisionist program mistakenly indicted these historians as presentists. As mentioned, egalitarian claims had been issued since the origins of schooling in America. And though the 1960s and 1970s historians were deeply committed to the realization of a truly democratic society, they were not guilty of grafting their social, political, and economic concerns upon the past; rather, they simply held earlier educational thinkers to task: where, they asked, was the proof that schooling had in fact led to a more democratic society marked by equal opportunity? From their vantage point—the turbulent 1960s and 1970s in which social reform movements focused heavily on inequality—the proof was utterly lacking. Thus, they concluded that the “time-honored faith that public schooling effectively paved the way for future mobility and status for generations of Americans” was merely a fantasy.21

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The radical attack began with Michael B. Katz’s The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century America, published in 1968. Katz’s primary aim was “to dissolve the myths enveloping the origins of popular education in America.”22 In doing so, he reversed Cubberley’s analysis: educational history had not been a tale of democratic participation and the expansion of equal opportunity for young people; rather, it was tainted by the legacy of imposition and inequality. “But why,” Katz asked, “pierce such a warm and pleasant myth?”23 His answer came in two parts. First, he wrote, in “piercing the vapor of piety we have been able to see fundamental patterns and problems in the course of American educational reform.”24 Second, he hoped that his research findings might prompt practitioners to look beyond the past when formulating plans for educational reform—as he put it, “We must realize that we have no models; truly to reform we must conceive and build anew.”25 The Irony of Early School Reform was not a comprehensive examination of nineteenth-century school reform. In fact, it was a somewhat esoteric and specialized academic study of several important “episodes” from Massachusetts’ educational past. But Katz hoped that his case studies would engender “a different and new perspective” and his work provided subsequent historians with a critical interpretive framework that could be applied to educational history in general. In doing so, Katz laid the groundwork for a “radical” historiography that would bear fruit for decades. For earlier historians like Ellwood Cubberley, the campaign to establish free, universal, and tax-supported schools was essentially a battle between the enlightened and the ignorant. According to Cubberley, the common school was supported by benevolent and progressive people: “citizens of the Republic,” “philanthropists and humanitarians,” “public men of large vision,” and the “intelligent workingmen in the cities.” Opponents, on the other hand, were more likely to be selfish or backwards: aristocrats and conservatives, “politicians of small vision,” country folk and southerners, “non-English-speaking classes,” and the “ignorant, narrow-mined, and penurious.”26 But Katz rejected Cubberley’s dichotomies and, instead, hypothesized that schoolmen were not altruistic bearers of knowledge, resources, and access. Rather, this group was motivated by a fear of social decay, a suspicion of immigrants, and a desire to enhance their own economic prospects. According to Katz, School committees were unashamedly trying to impose educational reform and innovation on this reluctant citizenry. The communal leaders were not answering the demands of a clamorous working class: they were imposing the demands; they were telling the majority, your children will be educated, and as we see fit.27

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According to Katz, school reformers had an utter disregard for family autonomy; indeed, one of their primary objectives was to “break [children’s] dependency, to wean the child from the parent to the real world; to perform aspects of the socialization process that parents had become unable to carry out.”28 In a rapidly changing world—experiencing industrialization, immigration, and urbanization, and fraught with social problems such as crime, poverty, and vice—traditional methods of socialization, which had previously taken place in the home and in the community at large, were no longer deemed sufficient. What children now needed, argued the reformers, was a “new morality,” a “reformation” of personality in which the passions and urges of children would be checked by “control, self-discipline, and restraint.”29 Essentially, the entire enterprise was an effort by one class to impose upon another “a pre-defined set of ideas, behaviors, and standards”—it was a campaign of indoctrination, wrote Katz, “an attempt by promoters to re-make the rest of mankind in their own image.”30 The reformers were driven by selfinterest; above all else, they sought to engineer an “an ordered, cohesive society” by building institutions that would transform children into obedient, well-behaved, and productive members of society.31 Joel Spring was one of the first historians to test Katz’s thesis, and he did so in 1972 with the publication of Education and the Rise of the Corporate State. Spring’s study focused on a different historical period—the early part of the twentieth century—but his argument was strikingly similar to Katz’s: “The public schools of the twentieth century,” wrote Spring, “were organized to meet the needs of the corporate state and consequently, to protect the interests of the ruling elite and the technological machine.”32 Spring contended that systems of modern schooling were inspired by the very same interests that controlled the country’s mechanisms of industrial production, with the latter shaping the curriculum, structure, and organization of the former. In Education and the Rise of the Corporate State, Spring traced the history of early, in-house industrial education programs— “company schools”—whose primary purpose was to produce pliant and efficient workers and he suggested that twentieth-century educational systems had been modeled after these factory schools. Adaptation to the new corporate organization of American society required a new type of person: a highly specialized worker who understood and accepted his assigned role within the corporate system. Economic prosperity and social stability, it was argued, required the simultaneous development of two somewhat contradictory impulses: highly specialized economic individualism combined with a cooperative spirit that would compel citizens to sublimate their needs and desires to the good of the social whole. Spring labeled this the principle of “cooperative individualism,” “which fully submerged the individual within the organization.”33 The problem with

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this logic, in Spring’s mind, was that it trapped young people within coercive institutions that gave industrialists and businessmen undue influence over the educational process. In such a context, “education” was sacrificed to a kind of “training” that taught children to be content with becoming “cogs” in the industrial machine.34 Beginning in the early twentieth century, educational reformers greatly expanded the scope of the school’s mission. With the addition of extracurricular programs, summer and vacation schools, playgrounds and other leisure-time facilities, and “evening recreation centers,” young people began to spend more time away from home and an increasing amount of time in school. The school’s curricular mission was also enlarged. In 1918 the National Education Association published a report titled “Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education,” which provided schoolmen with a monopolistic rationale and bestowed upon them the responsibility, if not the duty, for instructing youngsters in every aspect of life, citizenship, ethical behavior, vocation, “worthy” home membership, and the “proper” use of leisure time included. In sum, argued Spring, this expansive mission—which sought to educate the “whole child”—brought the child’s entire life under the school’s purview: this was to be a total system of social control, “an inexpensive form of police” that would discipline young people, regulate their behavior, and maintain social order.35 Spring argued that the modern school system “negated any broad concept of freedom” because students did not have the opportunity to really “choose [their] own goals and the opportunity to develop [their] own life style.”36 Within the school, young people encountered “human engineers who shaped individual abilities to fit a particular slot in the social organism.”37 This was not a particularly democratic institution that fostered opportunity and equality (nor was it intended to be); instead, self-interested reformers mobilized to “reinforce and strengthen existing social structures and social stratification.”38 Like Katz, Spring was not optimistic that the school would ever deliver on its promise of increased democratic participation and equal opportunity. And Education and the Rise of the Corporate State ended on a rather bleak note: As long as the public schools take responsibility for the socialization of the child, social adaptation to the institution becomes inevitable. The standards of freedom and individual life styles are determined by the organizational requirements of the institutions. Any talk about changing the goals of socialization without considering these factors is meaningless. The only possible solution is ending the power of the school.39

Spring’s concluding remarks were heavily influenced by the work of Ivan Illich, who published an extremely radical anti-school polemic in 1970, titled Deschooling Society. Illich argued that the fundamental flaw

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with modern educational systems was that “education” had been confused with “schooling” when, in fact, the two were actually separate and contradictory ideas. For Illich, education was a casual, informal, and spontaneous process that fostered a meaningful “relationship between man and his environment” and allowed learners to grow and develop freely.40 Schooling, on the other hand, was institutional, artificial, and narrow in purpose—“I shall define ‘school,’” he wrote, “as the age-specific, teacher-related process requiring full-time attendance at an obligatory curriculum.”41 Like Katz and Spring, there was little doubt in Illich’s mind that school hampered democracy and egalitarianism. Instead, it was an exploitative institution that had failed to adequately educate the poor; it was a drain on the country’s economy; it polarized society, sorted children into a system of castes, robbed them of their “self-respect,” and was “intellectually emasculating.”42 Moreover, in serving the interests of corporate elites, the school’s curriculum was most concerned with “maintaining a lifestyle which only allows us to make and unmake, produce and consume—a style of life which is merely a way station on the road to the depletion and pollution of the environment.”43 Deschooling Society also leveled a caustic critique on modern childhood itself and, in so doing, Illich raised more provocative questions about the unequal status of the child than did the radical revisionists. For Illich, the modern understanding of childhood was a byproduct of institutional segregation. As he put it, Only with the advent of industrial society did the mass production of ‘childhood’ become feasible and come within the reaches of the masses. The school system is a modern phenomenon, as is the childhood it produces.44

Illich declared that society would be better served without schools, that learning should be self-directed, deinstitutionalized, and placed at the center of community living. It was undoubtedly a utopian scheme, but for Illich it was the only way that young people could escape from an inhumane existence. “Growing up through childhood,” he wrote, “means being condemned to a process of inhuman conflict between self-awareness and the role imposed by a society going through its own school age.”45 Further, If there were no age-specific and obligatory learning institution, “childhood” would go out of production. The youth of rich nations would be liberated from its destructiveness, and poor nations would cease attempting to rival the childishness of the rich. If society were to outgrow its age of childhood, it would have to become livable for the young. The present disjunction between and adult society which pretends to be humane and a school environment which mocks reality could no longer be maintained.46

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Illich was not the only writer to underscore the contradictory nature of a society that sentimentalized children while simultaneously subjecting them to strict regulations and institutional regimens that could be dehumanizing. Other authors, writing at roughly the same time that the radical critique of educational history appeared, reached similar conclusions. Notable titles included Nat Hentoff’s Our Children Are Dying (1966), Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age (1967), and John Holt’s Escape from Childhood (1974). More so than the radical revisionists, however, these authors explored the inequities that were built into the institution of childhood itself, inside and outside of school. Of the three, Holt’s Escape from Childhood was by far the most radical—its critique of modern childhood was scathing and, by the book’s end, Holt had problematized nearly every institution, practice, and idea that affected young people. In an oft-quoted passage, he challenged his readers to question a fact of life that most took for granted: “By now I have come to feel that the fact of being a ‘child,’ of being wholly subservient and dependent, of being seen by older people as a mixture of expensive nuisance, slave, and super-pet, does most young people more harm than good.”47 Holt’s lasting contribution to radical scholarship lay in adding childhood to the larger conversation on oppression and equal rights, one that generally ignored age and focused on race, class, and gender. To counter the repression and tyranny children experienced in American society, Holt suggested that they seek the same rights that other groups had sought in their own struggles for equality. Unconventional and highly unorthodox, Holt proposed, quite simply, that “the rights, privileges, duties, responsibilities of adult citizens be made available to any young person, of whatever age, who wants to make use of them.”48 To gain their freedom, Holt thought that children—like other minority groups—would have to be granted the right to vote, work, travel, enter in to (and exit from), familial relationships at will, and, most significantly, “to direct and manage [their] own education.”49 Like Illich, Holt conceived of childhood as a socially constructed category that had been born, in large part, by patterns of institutional segregation. “In short,” he wrote, by the institution of childhood I mean all those attitudes and feelings, and also customs and laws, that put a great gulf or barrier between the young and their elders, and the world of their elders; that make it difficult or impossible for young people to make contact with the larger society around them, and, even more, to play any kind of active, responsible, useful part in it; that lock the young into eighteen years or more of subserviency and dependency.50

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Also following Illich, Holt separated “schooling” from “education.” At school, students learned “what someone else thinks would be good for [them],” while a truly democratic educational process would recognize that children should be given the right to “decide what goes into [their] minds.”51 For Holt, there was no more fundamental human right than educational freedom, but schools, which did not allow students to direct their own learning, committed “a gross violation of civil liberties . . . under the benevolent guise of compulsory universal education.”52 Holt’s solution was to do away with compulsory attendance laws and to make schooling completely voluntary, which would allow children to matriculate or drop out at will. He mapped out an “escape” route from school that would free young people from an institution that he thought robbed them of equal opportunity and the chance to succeed and thrive in the world. Similar to other critics writing in the 1960s and 1970s, Holt turned traditional notions of schooling inside out: Schools seem to me among the most anti-democratic, most authoritarian, most destructive, and most dangerous institutions of modern society. No other institution does more harm or more lasting harm to more people or destroys so much of their curiosity, independence, trust, dignity, and sense of identity and worth.53

Holt’s position was extreme, but others came to similar conclusions. Though less radical, and focused entirely on schooling, Kozol’s Death at an Early Age and Hentoff’s Our Children are Dying each chronicled the indignities and brutalities faced by children inside the urban schools of the 1960s. Kozol’s book documented his time teaching in a segregated primary school in Boston during the 1964–1965 academic year. It is a painful book to read, filled as it is with horrifying stories of deprivation and abuse. During his tenure at the school, Kozol observed teachers who spoke of “the Negro children in their charge as ‘animals’ and the school building that houses them as a ‘zoo.’” And the primary focus of the book lay in demonstrating how “the Boston school system [has] compelled its Negro pupils to regard themselves with something less than the dignity and respect of human beings.”54 Kozol’s memoir highlighted the fundamental inequalities that African American children faced in the ghetto schools of Boston, and his work brought to light just how far the schools went in denying equal civil rights to Boston’s black population. But the book is more broadly about children and the system that “seemed to militate carefully against” them.55 As Kozol noted, there was something quite Dickensian in the way children were treated in the schools: they were beaten with “bamboo whips”56 and held in great contempt by mediocre and autocratic teachers. “The result of this atmosphere,” he wrote, “was that too many children became believers in their own responsibility for

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being ruined and they themselves, like the teachers, began somehow to believe that some human material is just biologically better and some of it worse.”57 Many radical critiques of the day were highly idealistic—Illich and Holt’s being no exception—but Kozol’s memoir, based on personal experiences and observations, demonstrated just how viciously some public schools treated children in actual practice. Sadly, Kozol’s findings were not unique to one corrupt school system. Nat Hentoff’s Our Children are Dying reported on a similar situation in the schools of New York City. Hentoff’s reflection also resulted from his time observing the education of African American children, but the most pronounced difference between his work and Kozol’s was that Hentoff discovered within Harlem’s P.S. 119 a compassionate and effective administrator, Dr. Elliot Shapiro, who was genuinely committed to improving the lives and education of his charges. But as in Boston, New York City’s students were also schooled in an undemocratic system that and frequently worked against their best interests. Part of the problem was predicated on a pessimistic view of the children themselves, and of African American children in particular. The poor children of “Colour” in New York City and elsewhere in the country are still seen by too many of their teachers and principals as “degraded” by both color and class, so “degraded” that they cannot be “motivated” to learn as much as middle-class children can.58

Thus, African American children lacked not only the same educational opportunities afforded to their white peers, but they also were not regarded as “children” in the traditional sense: “We are led to believe,” wrote Hentoff, “by much of what we read, that the average slum child arrives at school something of a cross between an ignorant savage and a maniac.”59 In Education and the Rise of the Corporate State, Joel Spring hypothesized that the academic component of public schooling was always second to its mission of sorting and indoctrinating. School was less a place of “learning” than it was a site of human engineering and social control. As Spring wrote, “The school is and has been an instrument of social, economic, and political control. It is an institution which constantly plans to turn people into something.”60 It certainly seems wise, then, for historians and other educational scholars to pay special attention the logic and processes by which school systems sought to alter children’s behavior, social roles, values, and aspirations—what have schools, in various periods of American history, attempted to turn children into? If the theses of Illich, Holt, Kozol, and Hentoff are correct, then the answer to this question will differ dramatically from the one that circulated prior to the revisionist critique of the 1960s and 1970s.

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In March of 2000, forty leading historians of education met at Stanford University to participate in a conference sponsored by the Spencer Foundation. The conference—titled “New Directions in the History of Education”—provided an opportunity for educational historians to reflect upon their field’s past, but its primary concern lay in shaping a research agenda for the new millennium. It is striking that the “New Directions” conference, in urging educational historians to expand their studies to include previously underrepresented groups like Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans did not advise scholars to take a more nuanced view of childhood in American educational history. In their summary of the conference proceedings, Donato and Lazerson recognized that it was unsatisfactory for white historians to dominate the field, but nowhere was there mention of the theoretical problems that inhere in a discipline in which adults give meaning and voice to the experiences and lives of children. The problem is in some ways irresolvable, of course, for there exists no corps of child-historians to represent their group. But the difficulties and tensions of the “insider/outsider” historiographical dichotomy still exist.61 Donato and Lazerson also observed, “There is, for example, almost no synthesis or intersection across the communities [of color]; much of the history has been written in isolation—with Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans and others writing from or about only their particular communities.”62 The myopia of identity politics may have precluded historians from seeing one of the most obvious “cross-cultural” analyses present in their field: the study of childhood itself. Childhood is the common denominator that unifies all groups within the discourse and experience of schooling, it is the most fundamental mark of difference that educational institutions stamp upon their charges, and it is a condition shared by all groups in American society. As the sociologist Barry Goldson notes, children “constitute in every sense a minority status” and “may be analyzed and understood alongside other structural forms and divisions within society, including class, ‘race,’ gender, sexuality and disability.”63 John Holt made the same point in 1974 and plenty of other scholars have come to the same conclusion. How is it, then, that a convening of the best minds in the history of education, seeking to find “New Directions” for their discipline that would build upon the revisionist critique of the 1960s and 1970s, could have missed so promising an opportunity as this? Part of the problem, as mentioned, is methodological. As the historian of childhood Steven Mintz has written, “The history of childhood is often treated as a marginal subject, and there is no question that it is especially difficult to write. Children are rarely obvious historical actors. They leave fewer historical sources than adults, and their powerlessness makes them less visible than other social groups.”64 Sociologists Allison James and

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Alan Prout noted that children have, historically, been a “muted group.” Unable to actively influence the educational reform process themselves, young people have generally been situated as the objects of those processes. As James and Prout have written, “[children’s] lives are almost always determined and/or constrained in large measure by adults . . . almost all political, educational, legal and administrative processes, have profound effects on children by they have little or no influence over them.”65 Historians may indeed face insurmountable barriers in trying to locate the voices of children in American educational history. And it may be impossible to write thorough and complete historical analyses from “the child’s point of view.” Even if this were possible, historians would have to grapple with the difficult problem of interpretation, of giving voice to a group that has neither the training nor the institutional means to produce its own historical accounts. But even if the child’s voice remains lost, the endeavor is not a hopeless one. While the child’s lived experience will, at times, surely remain a mystery, historians still have access to sources written about children, by adults. In these cases, the historian’s task involves determining how adults conceived of childhood, how they imposed those conceptions upon young people, and the ways by which that process influenced the child’s position in society, the opportunities that were given to him, and the degree to which he embraced (or rejected) the social constraints that were imposed upon him. As LeRoy Ashby noted in his history of child abuse, the study of childhood frequently lays bare the contradictions, hypocrisies, ambivalences, and ulterior motives that adults themselves have concerning young people: “Adults spoke for [children], of course, but historically with many voices and changing agendas. Those responses invariably told far more about adult needs, expectations, anxieties, status, and ideologies than about the children themselves.”66 Historian John Demos made a similar point in reviewing the work of Philippe Ariès, one of the founding scholars in the historical study of childhood: concentrated not so much on the actual life-experience of children in the past as on the prevalent attitudes toward and about these children. His work is founded on the important and incontrovertible assumption that much can be learned about a culture by investigating the way it regards its young. In this sense, Centuries of Childhood is primarily about adults.67

The point is not to frame young people simply as a silenced and disenfranchised minority that find themselves unable to escape from the whims of adults; nor is at attempt to un-write experience from history. Rather, in reflecting upon the limits of children’s agency, while at the same time taking a critical and skeptical view of adults’ discourse about

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children, historians and other scholars will gain a greater understanding of the ways that adults use the ideas of children and childhood as rhetorical strategies that further particular positions within the larger social project. Allison James and Alan Prout, in suggesting a “new paradigm” for the sociology of childhood, ask their readers to re-theorize childhood not as a fact of life, but as a multifaceted social category that is historically contingent, highly variable, and bound to context. A primary task for historians, then, is to determine how social context gives rise to the categorization of youth, how notions of childhood were institutionalized and promulgated, why childhood has been such an effective discursive strategy in driving social and educational reform, and the ways in which the social reality of the child’s life never measured up to the ideals (positive or negative) crafted by those who spoke for children.68 Just as the radical revisionists were writing during a turbulent period in American history, today’s historians of education and childhood are also working at a time of social change. As issues of educational equality and the rights of young people are finding prominent positions in society’s discourse, both globally and nationally, scholars are now uniquely positioned to make relevant contributions to discussions that will impact today’s understanding of children and their rights. Historians of education, and particularly those interested in studying educational inequality, would be well served by joining the conversation that examines the fundamental problems—philosophical and practical—that emerge when children are positioned in ways that assure an unequal and inferior status. In doing so, the field will be challenged to question its own “orthodoxies” and, perhaps, embark upon a new direction. Historians should expand upon notions of educational inequality that gained prominence in the 1960s and 1970s and they should reframe some of the questions that guided their predecessors. In The Great School Legend, Colin Greer wondered about the curious paradox evident in reform efforts that promoted democracy and egalitarianism while simultaneously carefully guarding entrenched social, political, and economic privilege. Other radical historians wrestled with the same question, with many arriving at the conclusion that schools had been created as institutions of social control that protected elite interests. But if so, how was the reality of social inequality justified within a rhetorical context that, ostensibly, was committed to its eradication? Part of the answer, it seems, lies in the construction of childhood itself, for childhood has been specially cast as a necessarily unequal period in one’s social life that requires unequal treatment in segregated institutions. Nor do all children share in the same levels of inequality. In Kozol and Hentoff’s studies, for instance, “Negro” childhood was redefined in such a way that precluded full social participation and legitimized an unequal education.

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Only in revisiting past reform efforts, and focusing on the discourse of childhood itself, can historians adequately understand the role that ideas about childhood have played in creating, sustaining, and legitimizing educational inequality. As democratic possibilities slowly emerged for other groups, educational historians may wonder why America has remained a place where “the laws and the attitudes of the country still reflect strong parental authority, severe punishment for children out of control, and a firm reluctance to consider children’s rights aside from their parents.”69 A child-centered educational historiography, that takes into account the fact that the experience of “childhood” will be as diverse as the country itself, and one that refocuses some of the questions that drove an earlier radical historiography, has the potential to contribute greatly to a new chapter in the history of the American school. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER 1) In what way is Garrison’s argument unique when compared to others in this collection? What are the benefits of using this perspective? What might be the drawbacks?

2) How does John Holt’s document, “The Right to Control One’s Learning,” relate to children’s rights?

3) Would it be useful to view all of American education from the perspective of children? Why or why not?

4) Compare and contrast other scholars who have written histories of education by focusing on children’s perspectives.

h IN THEIR WORDS: THE RIGHT TO CONTROL ONE’S LEARNING

John Holt, Escape from Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1974). Chapter 24, “The Right to Control One’s Learning,” pp. 240–248.

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Young people should have the right to control and direct their own learning, that is, to decide what they want to learn, and when, where, how, how much, how fast, and with what help they want to learn it. To be still more specific, I want them to have the right to decide if, when, how much, and by whom they want to be taught and the right to decide whether they want to learn in a school and if so which one and for how much of the time. No human right, except the right to life itself, is more fundamental than this. A person’s freedom of learning is part of his freedom of thought, even more basic than his freedom of speech. If we take from someone his right to decide what he will be curious about, we destroy his freedom of thought. We say, in effect, you must think not about what interests and concerns you, but about what interest and concerns us. We might call this the right of curiosity, the right to ask whatever questions are most important to us. As adults, we assume that we have the right to decide what does or does not interest us, what we will look into and what we will leave alone. We take this right for granted, cannot imagine that it might be taken away from us. Indeed, as far as I know it, it has never been written into any body of law. Even the writers of our Constitution did not mention it. They thought it was enough to guarantee citizens the freedom of speech and the freedom to spread their ideas as widely as they wished and could. It did not occur to them that even the most tyrannical government would try to control people’s minds, what they thought and knew. That idea was to come later, under the benevolent guise of compulsory universal education. This right of each of us to control our own learning is now in danger. When we put into our laws the highly authoritarian notion that someone should and could decide what all young people were to learn and, beyond that, could do whatever might seem necessary (which now includes dosing them with drugs) to compel them to learn it, we took a long step down a very steep and dangerous path. The requirement that a child go to school, for about six hours a day, 180 days a year, for about ten years, whether or not he learns anything there, whether or not he already knows it or could learn it faster or better somewhere else, is such a gross violation of civil liberties that few adults would stand for it. But the child who resists is treated as a criminal. With this requirement we created an industry, an army of people whose whole work was to tell young people what they had to learn and to try to make them learn it. Some of these people, wanting to exercise even more power over others, to be even more “helpful,” or simply because the industry is not growing fast enough to hold all the people who want to get into it, are now beginning to say, “If it is good for children for us to decide what they shall learn and to make them learn it, why wouldn’t it be good for everyone? If compulsory education is a good thing, how can there be too much of it? Why should we allow

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anyone, of any age, to decide that he has had enough of it? Why should we allow older people, any more than young, not to know what we know when their ignorance may have bad consequences for all of us? Why should we not make them know what they ought to know?” They are beginning to talk, as one man did on a nationwide TV show, about “womb-to-tomb” schooling. If hours of homework every night are good for the young, why wouldn’t they be good for us all—they would keep us away from the TV set and other frivolous pursuits. Some group of experts, somewhere, would be glad to decide what we all ought to know and then every so often check up on us to make sure we knew it—with, of course, appropriate penalties if we did not. I am very serious in saying that I think this is coming unless we prepare against it and take steps to prevent it. The right I ask for the young is a right that I want to preserve for the rest of us, the right to decide what goes into our minds. This is much more than the right to decide whether or when or how much to go to school or what school you want to go to. That right is important, but it is only part of a much larger and more fundamental right, which I might call the right to Learn, as opposed to being Educated, i.e., made to learn what someone else thinks would be good for you. It is not just compulsory schooling but compulsory Education that I oppose and want to do away with. That children might have the control of their own learning, including the right to decide if, when, how much, and where they wanted to go to school, frightens and angers many people. They ask me, “Are you saying that if the parents wanted the child to go to school, and the child didn’t want to go, that he wouldn’t have to go? Are you saying that if the parents wanted the child to go to one school, and the child wanted to go to another, that the child would have the right to decide?” Yes, that is what I say. Some people ask, “If school wasn’t compulsory, wouldn’t many parents take their children out of school to exploit their labor in one way or another?” Such questions are often both snobbish and hypocritical. The questioner assumes and implies (though rarely says) that these bad parents are people poorer and less schooled than he. Also, though he appears to be defending the right of children to go to school, what he really is defending is the right of the state to compel them to go whether they want to or not. What he wants, in short, is that children should be in school, not that they should have any choice about going. But saying that children should have the right to choose to go or not to go to school does not mean that the ideas and wishes of the parents would have no weight. Unless he is estranged from his parents and rebelling against them, a child cares very much about what they think and want. Most of the time, he doesn’t want to anger or worry or disappoint them. Right now, in families where the parents feel that they have some choice

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about their children’s schooling, there is much bargaining about schools. Such parents, when their children are little, often ask them whether they want to go to nursery school or kindergarten. Or they may take them to school for a while to try it out. Or, if they have a choice of schools, they may take them to several to see which they think they will like best. Later, they care whether the child likes his school. If he does not, they try to do something about it, get him out of it, find a school he will like. I know some parents who for years had a running bargain with their children, “If on a given day you just can’t stand the thought of school, you don’t feel well, you are afraid of something that may happen, you have something of your own that you very much want to do—well, you can stay home.” Needless to say, the schools, with their supporting experts, fight it with all their might—Don’t Give in to Your Child, Make Him Go to School, He’s Got to Learn. Some parents, when their own plans make it possible for them to take an interesting trip, take their children with them. They don’t ask the school’s permission, they just go. If the child doesn’t want to make the trip and would rather stay in school, they work out a way for him to do that. Some parents, when their child is frightened, unhappy, and suffering in school, as many children are, just take him out. Hal Bennett, in his excellent book No More Public School, talks about ways to do this. A friend of mine told me that when her boy was in third grade, he had a bad teacher, bullying, contemptuous, sarcastic, and cruel. Many of the class switched to another section, but this eight-year-old, being tough, defiant, and stubborn, hung on. One day—his parents did not learn this until about two years later—having had enough of the teacher’s meanness, he just got up from his desk and without saying a word, walked out of the room and went home. But for all his toughness and resiliency of spirit, the experience was hard on him. He grew more timid and quarrelsome, less outgoing and confident. He lost his ordinary good humor. Even his handwriting began to go to pieces—it was much worse in the spring of the school year than in the previous fall. One spring day he sat at breakfast, eating his cereal. After a while he stopped eating and sat silently thinking about the day ahead. His eyes filled up with tears, and two big ones slowly rolled down his cheeks. His mother, who ordinarily stays out of the school life of her children, saw this and knew what it was about. “Listen,” she said to him, “we don’t have to go on with this. If you’ve had enough of that teacher, if she’s making school so bad for you that you don’t want to go any more, I’ll be perfectly happy just to pull you right out. We can manage it. Just say the word.” He was horrified and indignant. “No!” he said, “I couldn’t do that.” “Okay,” she said, “whatever you want is fine. Just let me know.” And so they left it. He had decided that he was going to tough it out, and he did. But I am sure knowing

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that he had the support of his mother and the chance to give it up if it got too much for him gave him the strength he needed to go on. To say that children should have the right to control and direct their own learning, to go to school or not as they chose, does not mean that the law would forbid the parents to express an opinion or wish or strong desire on the matter. It only means that if their natural authority is not strong enough the parents can’t call in the cops to make the child do what they are not able to persuade him to do. And the law may say that there is a limit to the amount of pressure or coercion the parents can apply to the child to deny him a choice that he has a legal right to make. When I urge that children should control their learning there is one argument that people bring up so often that I feel I must anticipate and meet it here. It says that schools are a place where children can for a while be protected against the bad influences of the world outside, particularly from its greed, dishonesty, and commercialism. It says that in school children may have a glimpse of a higher way of life, of people acting from other and better motives than greed and fear. People say, “We know that society is bad enough as it is and that children will be exposed to it and corrupted by it soon enough. But if we let children go out into the larger world as soon as they wanted, they would be tempted and corrupted just that much sooner.” They seem to believe that schools are better, more honorable places than the world outside—what a friend of mind at Harvard once called “museums of virtue.” Or that people in school, both children and adults, act from higher and better motives than people outside. In this they are mistaken. There are, of course, some good schools. But on the whole, far from being the opposite of, or an antidote to, the world outside, with all its envy, fear, greed, and obsessive competitiveness, the schools are very much like it. If anything, they are worse, a terrible, abstract, simplified caricature of it. In the world outside the school, some work, at least is done honestly and well, for its own sake, not just to get ahead of others; people are not everywhere and always being set in competition against each other; people are not (or not yet) in every minute of their lives subject to the arbitrary, irrevocable orders and judgment of others. But in most schools, a student is every minute doing what others tell him, subject to their judgment, in situations in which he can only win at the expense of other students. This is a harsh judgment. Let me say again, as I have before, that schools are worse than most of the people in them and that many of these people do many harmful things they would rather not do, and a great many other harmful things that they do not even see as harmful. The whole of school is much worse than the sum of its parts. There are very few people in the U.S. today (or perhaps anywhere, any time)

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in any occupation, who could be trusted with the kind of power that schools give most teachers over their students. Schools seem to me among the most antidemocratic, most authoritarian, most destructive, and most dangerous institutions of modern society. No other institution does more harm or more lasting harm to more people or destroys so much of their curiosity, independence, trust, dignity, and sense of identity and worth. Even quite kindly schools are inhibited and corrupted by the knowledge of children and teachers alike that they are performing for the judgement and approval of others—the children for the teachers; the teachers for the parents, supervisors, school board, or the state. No one is ever free from feeling that he is being judged all the time, or soon may be. Even after the best class experiences teachers must ask themselves, “Were we right to do that? Can we prove we were right? Will it get us in trouble?” What corrupts the school, and makes it so much worse than most of the people in it, or than they would like it to be, is its power—just as their powerlessness corrupts the students. The school is corrupted by the endless anxious demand of the parents to know how their child is doing—meaning is he ahead of the other kids—and their demand that he be kept ahead. Schools do not protect children from the badness of the world outside. They are at least as bad as the world outside, and the harm they do to the children in their power creates much of the badness of the world outside. The sickness of the modern world is in many ways a school-induced sickness. It is in school that most people learn to expect and accept that some expert can always place them in some sort of rank or hierarchy. It is in school that we meet, become used to, and learn to believe in the totally controlled society. We do not learn much science, but we learn to worship “scientists” and to believe that anything we might conceivably need or want can only come, and someday will come, from them. The school is the closest we have yet been able to come to Huxley’s Brave New World, with its alphas and betas and epsilons—and now it even has its soma. Everyone, including children, should have the right to say “No!” to it.

h NOTES 1. V. P. Franklin, “Education in Urban Communities in the United States: Exploring the Legacy of Lawrence A. Cremin,” Pedagogica Historica 39 (No. 1 and 2, 2003): 153.

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2. Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society: Need and Opportunities for Study (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 8, 9. 3. Ibid., 9. 4. Ibid., 10. 5. Ibid., 8. 6. The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley: An Essay on the Historiography of American Education, (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1965), 19. 7. Ibid., 17. 8. Jurgen Herbst, “The History of Education: State of the Art at the Turn of the Century in Europe and North America,” Paedagogica Historia 35 (No. 3, 1999), 737. 9. Diane Ravitch, The Revisionists Revised: A Critique of the Radical Attack on the Schools (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 165. 10. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1977), ix. 11. Ibid., 28. 12. Ellwood P. Cubberley, Public Education in the United States: A Study and Interpretation of American Educational History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1919), 491. 13. Bailyn, 14. 14. Bruce L. Hood, “The Historian of Education: Some Notes on His Role,” History of Education Quarterly 9 (Autumn 1969): 372–375. 15. Sol Cohen, Challenging Orthodoxies: Toward a New Cultural History of Education (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 295. 16. bid., 289. 17. Ibid., 290. 18. Colin Greer, The Great School Legend: A Revisionist Interpretation of American Public Education (New York: Basic Books, 1972), 35–36. 19. Ibid., 3; 4; 38. 20. Ibid., 25. 21. Ibid., 6. 22. Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 218. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Cubberley, 120. 27. Katz [1968], 47. 28. Ibid., 119. 29. Ibid., 121. 30. Ibid., 130, 131. 31. Ibid., 213.

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32. Joel Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 1–2. 33. Ibid., 3; 18. 34. Ibid., 45. 35. Ibid., 76–77. 36. Ibid., 162, 165. 37. Ibid., 91. 38. Ibid., 151. 39. Ibid., 171–172. 40. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 104; Illich, in fact, wrote the foreword to Education and the Rise of the Corporate State. 41. Ibid., 38. 42. Ibid., 43; 14. 43. Ibid., 76. 44. Ibid., 39–40. 45. Ibid., 41. 46. Ibid. 47. John Holt, Escape from Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1974), 18. 48. Ibid. [Emphasis in the original.] 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 25–26. 51. Ibid., 242–243. 52. Ibid., 241. 53. Ibid., 247. 54. Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 7. 55. Ibid., 110. 56. Ibid., 9. 57. Ibid., 60. 58. Ibid., xiii. 59. Nat Hentoff, Our Children are Dying (New York: The Viking Press, 1966), ix. 60. Spring, 149. 61. Rubén Donato and Marvin Lazerson, “New Directions in American Educational History: Problems and Prospects,” Educational Researcher 29 (November 2000): 4–15. 62. Donato and Lazerson, 8. 63. Barry Goldson, “‘Childhood’: An Introduction to Historical and Theoretical Analyses,” in Phil Scranton (ed.) ‘Childhood’ in ‘Crisis’ (London: UCL Press, 1997), 20. 64. Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), vii–viii. 65. Allison James and Alan Prout, “A New Paradigm for the Sociology of Childhood? Provenance, Promise, and Problems,” in Allison James and Alan

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Prout (eds.), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood (London: Falmer Press, 1997), 29. 66. LeRoy Ashby, Endangered Children: Dependency, Neglect, and Abuse in American History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997), 1–2. 67. John Demos, “Developmental Perspectives on the History of Childhood,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2 (No. 2, 1971), 315. 68. James and Prout. 69. Mary Ann Mason, “The U.S. and the International Children’s Rights Crusade: Leader or Laggard?” Journal of Social History 38 (Summer 2005), 961.

2 ✛

The Cornerstone of the Republic: George Washington and the National University Ryan Staude

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hroughout his two presidential terms and brief retirement, one of George Washington’s chief interests was to establish a centrally located national university. He viewed it as a vehicle to draw the nation closer together and encourage the rise to prominence of talented men. Debate over a national university originated in the wake of revolution and concurrently with talk of a stronger national government. As Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison were working to call a convention to revise the Articles of Confederation, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician, became the first serious advocate of a national university.1 One year prior to the convocation of the Constitutional Convention, Rush wrote to Richard Price that the American Revolution was not over, “We have changed our forms of government, but it remains yet to effect a revolution in our principles, opinions, and manners.” Americans had adopted a republican mode of government in 1781, but according to Rush the nation had presumptuously assumed these “forms of government.”2 A proper educational system was the best method of instilling the correct values and knowledge within Americans so they would be receptive to republicanism. Writers and public figures agreed that educating youth about the principles and contours of government was important if the republic were to succeed. Rush was the most prominent spokesperson for 35

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educational reform. In his famous 1786 essay, “Thoughts Upon the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic,” Rush wrote that America’s independence had caused education to acquire “a new complexion.” The United States’s independence demanded an educational system that would inculcate republican ideals necessary for the country’s survival. Republicanism was not just a mode of government, but a way of thinking that was not natural to most people for it demanded self-sacrifice and virtuous habits. “Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property.”3 Even if people were not born with republican values, with proper instruction, they could learn them over time and be converted into “republican machines.”4 For Rush, to neglect education and allow the haphazard systems then in place to continue unaltered was to court disaster. Just as sure as too strong of an attachment to monarchical tendencies would lead to corruption so too would ignorance. “In our opposition to monarchy, we forgot that the temple of tyranny has two doors. We bolted one of them by proper restraints; but we left the other open, by neglecting to guard against the effects of our own ignorance and licentiousness.”5 Here then is Rush’s primary concern: if America’s educational system was not redesigned the country would lack qualified officials for governance, and also it would be a boon to ignorance. Ignorance led to a lack of knowledge on forms of government, and to behavior destructive of republicanism. Other authors agreed with Rush that education needed to instill virtue and prepare young men for service to the government. Samuel Smith wrote that the purpose of education was to make men “wise and virtuous.” In his piece, “An Essay on the Best System of Liberal Education, Adapted to the Genius of the Government of the United States,” Samuel Knox wrote that a specifically national education system would lead to an “improvement of the [American] mind,” and “the attainment of those arts on which the welfare, prosperity, and happiness of society depend.”6 Even Noah Webster, though he was more egalitarian than Rush, agreed that education was needed to instill republican values in American youth.7 A national university would serve as the capstone of a national education system. While there was divergence among the writers of the time as to the utility of a federally controlled education system, most maintained at least some interest in establishing a national university.8 Rush first proposed the idea in a 1787 piece in the American Museum magazine. His thoughts on the university are a logical sequel to the ideas presented in his “Thoughts Upon the Mode of Education.” If the primary purpose of education was to prepare boys for service in the government then the university’s curriculum should support this goal.

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In this university, let every thing connected with government, such as history—the law of nature and nations—the civil law—the municipal laws of our country—and the principles of commerce—be taught by competent professors.9

Additionally, military arts and economic principles would be taught at the university. The university would serve strictly as a graduate institution to which students would repair after “completing their academical studies in the colleges of their respective states.”10 Rush wrote his piece with an eye towards convincing the delegates at the Constitutional Convention to establish the university. His university was not designed to prepare students for a variety of careers. Almost two years after his first publication, Rush wrote a more detailed plan for the university in the American Museum. Again, the emphasis was on politics, military studies, and the economy, but this time he also said that students should study relevant mathematics (besides those needed for gunnery and building fortifications), philology, French, German, and engage in “athletic and manly exercises.” In order for the school to be kept up-to-date with the latest advances in knowledge, Rush proposed sending four students to Europe, at the public’s expense, to gather information about “all the improvements that are daily made . . . in agriculture, manufactures, and commerce, and in the art of war and practical government.”11 Rush then expanded on a brief section of his 1787 Museum essay—that only university graduates should be able to fill the offices of the American government. “We require certain qualifications in lawyers, physicians, and clergymen. . . . Why then should we submit our country . . . to men who cannot produce vouchers of their qualifications for the important trust.”12 Rush sought to avoid having “quacks in government” much like he would avoid having swindlers, cheats, and otherwise unqualified practitioners in any professional job. As David W. Robson points out this was Rush’s elitism showing through because it would disqualify non-university men from holding office. Eventually, wealthy elites would constitute the whole of the governmental edifice.13 Other writers followed Rush’s outlines for the national university with some exceptions. Writing in the same periodical in October 1789 Gazette of the United States publisher John Fenno called for a national university so people could be “uniformly educated in an abhorrence of every attempt that may be formed to deprive them of this [liberty] mighty boon of heaven.”14 Rush was noticeably quiet on the student body of his university but Fenno made it a point that the university should be open to all young men of talent. Fenno stops short of calling for direct government subsidizing of tuition, but says that the costs should be kept low so that

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“expense may be no bar to those who may wish to participate of the instruction there to be received.”15 In 1795 the American Philosophical Society held a competition for the best essay on an education system for the United States. No where in the title for the competition was the term “national” used, but the two winning entries both argued for a national (government controlled) education system. Additionally, both authors saw the national university as the logical capstone to their plans of study. In “An Essay on the Best System of Liberal Education,” Samuel Knox said that a properly constituted national university would resemble the sun, or “that great source and center of light to the natural world.”16 Knox’s plan deviates in two areas from Rush’s proposal. First, he required clergymen who wanted to teach at the university to be nondenominational or suspend their preaching while tenured. Second, Knox was not as concerned with producing government officials as Rush. For Knox, the great end of the national university should be to accommodate such as wished to indulge their literary genius to the greatest possible extent, and who were in such circumstance as to account no part of their life spent more agreeably to better advantage than in receiving the highest possible improvement in arts and sciences.17

Knox’s university was a place where upper-class males could receive a fine liberal arts education, thereby obviating the need for European schooling. Some students would go on to careers in government, but, as it is outlined, the university would be a finishing school for those looking to have a well-rounded education. The second winner of the Society’s contest was Samuel H. Smith’s essay “Remarks on Education: Illustrating the Close Connection between Virtue and Wisdom.” Smith’s plan for a national education system also included a national university in which the top ten percent of students from the nation’s public colleges would be selected for enrollment at the national university to study the “highest brands of science and literature.”18 This pyramid-structured educational system was notable for its emphasis on how a national system could set an example to the rest of the world. It would help the United States take its place among the great nations of the world, and if its example demonstrated “dignity, humility, and intelligence” the rest of the world would follow because “nation is influenced as powerfully by nation as one individual is influenced by another.”19 Education and the national university were not foremost among the issues discussed in the 1790s. Alexander Hamilton’s financial system, the emergence of political parties, and the growing disputes involving France and England consumed much of the new government’s time and energy. However, its advocates were vocal because of the centrality of education

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in the development of financial policy and foreign affairs.20 According to Rush, until a university was established the new government labored to make “bricks without straw” and the union was nothing more than a “rope of sand.” The university would complete the American Revolution and usher in a “golden age” for the United States.21 Rush, and other writers, filled the pages of the American Museum magazine with their urgent calls for a university. Among the magazine’s five hundred subscribers was George Washington.22 Washington’s own formal education was modest. Although his older brothers, Lawrence and Augustine, had received their formal educations in England, Washington enjoyed no European private school, or even a stint at William and Mary in Williamsburg. He received a rudimentary education for a few years, but when his father, Augustine, died in 1743, he took up the surveyor’s trade. By the mid-1740s Washington embarked upon a lifelong pattern of self-education for the real world of agriculture and military affairs.23 This is most evident in his famously handtranscribed list of 110 precepts from The Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation. Washington copied these rules and used them as a blueprint for his personal deportment in a society that was very concerned with outward appearances and manners. Attesting to his dedication to life-long learning, Washington eventually amassed an impressive personal library composed of over 900 volumes.24 However, Washington never considered himself well-educated. When his former aide David Humphreys urged Washington to write an autobiography after the revolution, the retired general replied, “I am conscious of a defective education, and want of capacity to fit me for such an undertaking.”25 His inadequate preparation made him a strong proponent of public education, so much so that Washington paid for his nephews’ schooling. Although his wife’s son Jacky was too headstrong to heed his stepfather’s advice, her grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, and Washington’s nephews, George Steptoe Washington and Lawrence Augustine Washington were more attentive, if only because their educations depended on the elder Washington’s beneficence. When George Steptoe and Lawrence Augustine’s father died in 1781, Washington took charge of his nephews’ educations and counseled them to be serious and diligent in their studies. His letters to the boys and their tutors reveal Washington’s concern with the utility of their lessons. He wanted them to learn material that would befit their station in Virginia society. Writing to Stephen Bloomer Balch in 1784 Washington requested that the boys be instructed in “French language and such parts of the mathematics as will bring them acquainted with practical surveying, which is useful to every man who has landed property.”26 Though he did permit them to take dance lessons he admonished one of their tutors

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that the boys needed an education to prepare them for the “ordenary [sic] purposes of life.”27 Perhaps knowing how his early training in arithmetic had helped him eventually acquire large tracts of land, Washington urged all those involved in his nephews’ education that they learn the “less abstruse branches of the mathematics” so that they could be more knowledgeable in buying, selling, and settling land.28 In addition to stressing the practical applications of knowledge, Washington urged all his young wards to take their education seriously. As his stepgrandson was getting ready to enter Princeton in 1798 Washington told him that his education held the key to his future reputation and position in life, “it is on a well grounded knowledge . . . your respectability in maturer age; your usefulness to your country; and indeed your own private gratifications . . . will depend.”29 He took education seriously and implored others to do the same. Washington’s other primary experience with the usefulness of education came during the revolution. Even though his military experience did not go beyond eight years’ active duty with the Virginia militia, the Continental Congress charged Washington with leading an army composed of soldiers from every state in the union, and some foreign nations. As with many of his ideas, the war was the primary crucible in which Washington forged his thoughts about education and its impact on the nation. As commander-in-chief Washington saw the discord that prevailed among the soldiers from the various parts of the union. However, Washington also saw this dissonance melt away in the heat of battle, and eight long years of privations. At the war’s conclusion, Washington’s ex-aide, turned New York Congressman, Alexander Hamilton wrote the general to solicit his thoughts on a peacetime military establishment. The Congress was then debating what sort of military the nation should have when the hostilities were formally concluded.30 Washington quickly replied to Hamilton’s request. On May 2, 1783, he submitted a set of proposals popularly referred to as his “Sentiments on a Peace Establishment.” After detailing the threats facing the new nation and the proper responses to these threats, Washington called for the establishment of a military academy to further the study of military science. The school was needed, mostly, to train engineers and artillerists in that “species of knowledge” which was necessary for excellence in their profession.31 Superficially, the most important similarity between Washington’s proposed military academy and his plans for a national university was that both were to be under government control. However, in his “Sentiments” proposals, one can see the origins of two reasons Washington would later use as pretexts for establishing the national university. First, the school would primarily teach military engineering. Washington’s

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rationale was that a specialized knowledge demands specialized instruction. This logic would later reappear in his thoughts on the national university, and its role in training citizens for service to the government. Just as his military academy would teach students the mathematics and science required for the precise arts of fortifications and artillery warfare, the national university would teach students about the science of government and republicanism. Additionally, a military school would obviate the need for the army to recruit foreign engineers into its ranks. Finally, his plan would free America from dependence on European institutions and save the country’s impressionable youth from European decadence and luxury. Washington first happened upon the idea of a national university in the pages of the American Museum magazine. If he did not read Rush’s pronouncements on education and the university, he most certainly heard the debates involving a national university at the Constitutional convention in the summer of 1787. Twice, Virginian James Madison and South Carolinian delegate Charles Cotesworth Pinckney proposed that Congress specifically be given the power to establish a national university. On the other hand, Governor Morris suggested that Congress would have “exclusive power at the seat of government,” and such power would allow the legislature to create a national university at the capital.32 Though Washington may not have heard of the national university proposal until 1787 he had been thinking about the subject during his brief retirement. In 1785 he wrote that establishment of schools should be “one of our first endeavors,” and that the nation yearned for “something to expand the mind, and make us think with more liberality and act with sounder policy.”33 When Washington was called upon to make his first address to the new Congress in January 1790 he chose to highlight education. He issued a very general call for Congress to promote science and literature because “knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.” Washington also said that improved education would add to the security of the United States. It would convince “those, who are entrusted with the public administration, that every valuable end of government is best answered by the enlightened confidence of the people.” Mostly, though, education would benefit the people. It would cure them of their ignorance concerning their rights. Education led people to distinguish between “oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority” and taught that all burdens do not emanate from government disregard. Finally, Washington hoped an educated citizenry could “discriminate between the spirit of liberty and licentiousness.” He left it to the legislators as to whether the best method of arriving at these goals was through aid to already functioning colleges, or the establishment of a national university.34

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Undoubtedly, the articles in American Museum had influenced Washington’s thoughts on education. In his first Congressional address Washington was primarily concerned with the benefits of disseminating knowledge—most acutely the spread of liberty. The address most directly recalls John Fenno’s October 1789 piece in its promotion of education as a means for citizens to know their rights and to determine when they are being unjustly usurped. Though Washington mentioned the national university, he did not call specifically for its establishment. Nor did he address his two greatest fears: sectional dispute and the custom of traveling abroad to receive an education. Despite the fact that Washington had many pressing issues to address during his two terms as president, education appeared in his correspondence frequently. Shortly after his first state of the union speech, Washington received a report on the frontier from Secretary of War Henry Knox. Knox urged the establishment of a national university so America’s youth could receive the “highest and more finished parts of education.” Knox does not specifically mention the school as one which would specialize in political training, but he does offer the argument that would become one of Washington’s keystone reasons for the university: patriotic unity that would suppress sectional loyalties and encourage allegiance to the nation. Knox wrote: Such an institution while it assisted in diffusing light and knowledge would be attended with the best political effects in cementing the several states of this extended republic, and preventing a practice of sending American Youth to different parts of Europe for their education.35

Other government officials, including Hamilton, Jefferson, James Madison, and Vice President John Adams supported the idea of a national university. By the time the planning had started for the new capital city on the banks of the Potomac River, Washington realized that a national university was the best method to achieve his objectives of making sure that the United States was independent, secure, and unified. The president kept up a steady correspondence with the commissioners for the nation’s new capital city. In addition to discussing the placement of public buildings, and other questions related to the city’s layout, Washington continually urged the commissioners to remember his plans for a national university in the city. In January 1795, five years after Knox pushed the idea of the university as a nationalizing force, Washington told the commissioners that the university would be a place where “youth from different parts of the rising republic” would repair to, and be disabused of the “prejudices” that arose from “local circumstances.”36

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In earlier letters to Secretary of State Edmund Randolph and Madison, he had solicited a means for converting his shares in the Potomac and James River companies into funding for a national university.37 In early 1795 the now retired Thomas Jefferson told Washington of an offer from the faculty of the prestigious University of Geneva to relocate, en masse, to the United States. Here was an opportunity for the United States to land some of the world’s most renowned scholars, but Washington hesitated. Since the university was not built, the faculty would have to teach at an existing institution, and this would take focus away from a university in the nation’s capital. Additionally, the republican principles of these men were unknown.38 Perhaps it was with this offer in mind that on the next day Washington wrote to Virginia governor Robert Brooke concerning the disposition of his shares in the Potomac and James companies. It was more efficacious, in Washington’s mind, if the stock was not divided but rather devoted entirely to the national university. Recalling his objection to European influence in the education of American youth Washington wrote that there was “a serious danger” in sending youth abroad to immerse themselves in political systems which were inimical to republican values.39 Though little of his time was devoted to the national university during his presidency Washington did finally arrive at the notion that the national university was instrumental in realizing his vision for America’s future. He also began to articulate his reasons behind the university with greater clarity and focus during his two terms. As he came to the end of his second term, Washington desperately wanted to convey his strong sentiments on education to the public. His first chance would be his farewell to his fellow citizens. Washington retrieved a copy of the address Madison had written for him when he pondered retirement in 1792. This time, working with Alexander Hamilton, Washington shaped the address to accurately reflect his views on the state of the nation.40 Included in Washington’s draft were his thoughts on the proprietary of Congress establishing a university. When Hamilton deleted this section Washington again fell back on his now constant refrain that the university was needed because it would collect the best and brightest youth of the nation and they would “discover that there was not that cause for those jealousies and prejudices which one part of the Union” held against another. Hamilton suggested that the appropriate place for specific details involving the university was the president’s last message to Congress.41 In the end, Washington made sure that Hamilton included some cursory remarks on education in the piece. Though no mention was made of the national university it was clear what Washington referred to when he said that it was an “object of primary importance” for the public to promote “institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge.” Only then, would the public opinion be truly “enlightened.”42

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Following Hamilton’s suggestion, Washington devoted a good measure of his last address to Congress to the national university. Aid to existing colleges was not enough because they lacked the pecuniary resources to attract the best faculty. Only a federally supported university could command the resources for the best facilities and teachers. In addition to re-stating the tropes of the university as a harmonizing force for union and an alternative to a European education, this address marked the first time that Washington called for the university’s primary academic function to be the study of the “science of government.” Republics demand an educated citizenry and the outgoing president called for Congress to act for the next generation of leaders, or as Washington termed them, the “future guardians of liberty.”43 Retirement brought Washington time to relax and attend to his beloved Mt. Vernon. Even though Washington was away from government he kept an eye on the Adams administration and was well-informed of current events through his voracious appetite for newspapers. He continued to contemplate the idea of establishing a national university. In a reply to St. George Tucker, thanking him for forwarding a copy of his “Sketch for a Plan for the Endowment and Establishment of a National University,” Washington wrote that he never stopped thinking about the university and his concern for the project was “great, and unceasing.”44 Washington also told Tucker that his retirement would allow him to formulate his own plan for a university. Unfortunately, Washington was never able to put his plans on paper because he was swept into the public’s eye once again in July 1798 when President John Adams named him commanderin-chief of the American army amidst fears of war with France.45 His involvement in organizing the new army left Washington little time to devote to the university, but even as his health declined he did not banish the cause from his mind. When he sat down to compose his will in July 1799 Washington remembered the university and bequeathed his fifty shares of stock (at the time worth over $22,000) in the Potomac Company to the endowment of a national university.46 Washington began this section in the will lamenting that American boys were accustomed to traveling to Europe “before their minds were formed,” and therefore contracting “principles unfriendly to Republican Government.”47 The university would provide a place for the boys to receive an American education and “free themselves . . . to a proper degree from those local prejudices and habitual jealousies,” which could ruin the union.48 The man, who began his life without formal schooling, ended it by calling on his nation to establish the most advanced educational institution of its kind. While Washington continually pushed for the establishment of a national university, Congress never heeded his call nor did the public enthusiastically support his idea. There is scant mention of the university in

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the newspapers of the time period. With the exception of a few opinion pieces, the university was usually mentioned in connection with other events.49 It was the subject of college commencement orations at Yale and the College of Rhode Island in September 1799. Most notably, the Columbian Centinel reported that a Philadelphia debating society discussed the proposal shortly after President Washington’s last message to Congress, and the idea was solidly defeated.50 While the university existed mostly in the air of speculation and debate in the 1790s Samuel Blodget did try to raise money for the project. As Superintendent of Buildings for the new capital city, he established a lottery to raise money to begin construction on several residences. Selling for eight dollars apiece, he hoped to sell 50,000 tickets. The top six winners received homes in the District of Columbia as well as cash prizes. Part of the proceeds went to the establishment of a national university. One of the few people in the 1790s to move beyond the realm of planning for the university to actually raising money, Blodget never completed his plans to build the university. He eventually wound up in debtors’ prison on charges relating to the payment of prizes from the lottery.51 The only substantial legislative debate on the subject took place shortly after Washington’s last message to Congress. The Senate, in its reply to the president, felt comfortable issuing a general agreement with the president’s call for a university on the ground that it “may be converted to a most useful purpose—the science of legislation.” Neglecting to comment on restraining the nation’s youth from going abroad, the Senate did say that the university would help the United States “assume a more dignified station, among the nations of the earth.”52 The House of Representatives conducted a more substantial discussion on the project partly because it had received a memorial from the Commissioners for the District of Columbia to allow them to receive, and hold in trust, donations for the national university. The timing of the request was not coincidental. One of the commissioners wrote to James Madison on December 2 (five days prior to Washington’s address) that it was “a favourable moment to bring the business forward. Washington being about to retire his recommendation will be considered as the last request of a departing friend.”53 The memorial was passed to a special committee and on December 21, 1796 the committee reported its recommendation to the full House that “proper persons” should have authority to hold donations for the university.54 The House arranged itself into a Committee of the Whole to debate the committee’s report. Opponents of the report advanced two arguments to support their position: first, approving the recommendation was an “entering wedge” that would eventually lead to calls for congressional financial support of the university. Secondly, a national university in Washington, D.C. would serve little purpose to those

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located in distant territories. John Nicholas of Virginia was the first to speak against the university. He emphasized that it was not the right time for a national university, and that the future of the topic was unknown. “We are now going into the subject, but we know not to what lengths it may carry us.”55 Later in the debate he made it a point that knowledge was not solely circumscribed to the federal government, and that federal aid was not needed to support it.56 Representative William Lyman of Pennsylvania articulated the fear that the university would be “out of reach of people in general, and of the middling class in particular.” Financing the university would sow great seeds of discontent among the people of the frontier because their money would go to pay for “others to obtain the advantage” of national education.57 Nicholas also contributed to this argument when he made the point that children who were far removed from their parents experienced a drop in morals. Far from instilling morals and republican values in its students, the university, due to its location, would produce profligate and licentious citizens.58 Madison and the memorial’s supporters continuously made the point that the committee’s recommendation did not authorize, nor did it explicitly support, a national university. Congress was only granting the authority to certain persons to hold donations for the university in trust. Madison went so far as to argue that the committee’s report said nothing about a national university, but rather authorized persons to hold donations for a university to be established in the District of Columbia.59 The latent suggestion in Nicholas’s and Lyman’s arguments, and the one that Madison strove to address with his comment about the report’s wording, was a fear of increasing government centralization. David Madsen rightly points out that there was no constitutional argument offered against the university, but present in the arguments against the acceptance of the committee’s report were fears of many Republicans of an overly powerful national government. Why have a national university, Lyman asked, when it would only lead to neglect of local schools? Nicholas went farther saying that each locality bore the responsibility of educating its own citizens.60 The arguments against the university moved enough representatives to vote for a postponement of the question until the New Year, but the House never again took up the committee’s report.61 George Washington’s thinking on the national university evolved during his presidency and retirement in the late 1790s. He began the decade with a vague call for Congress to promote arts and literature through whatever means they deemed best, but at the end of his presidency he had come to realize that only a national university could achieve the goals he thought appropriate for the nation’s youth. Washington saw that the university could achieve five purposes.

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First, it would function as a specialized school for the instruction of future government officials. Just as specialized branches of the military demanded a specific set of skills and knowledge, so too must government officials be properly trained in government and law. In 1783 Washington proposed a military academy where the first priority would be to instruct America’s officers in the arts of the military science. Likewise, Washington’s national university would primarily be a school designed to teach the principles of the “science of government.”62 Like Benjamin Rush, Washington thought that the national university was needed to instill republican values and morals in the body politic. Washington had long held that “the best means of forming a manly, virtuous, and happy people” was the “right education of youth.”63 For Washington, the prosperity of the state was connected to the type of education its children received, “the welfare of the state and happiness of the people are advanced or retarded in proportion as the morals and good education of the youth are attended to.”64 The dissemination of knowledge invariably led to the spread of liberty, but the knowledge must be republican in nature. Therefore, America’s youth could not travel to Europe for their education especially if they had not been properly inculcated with republican values. Washington saw a great danger in sending the nation’s future leaders to different countries to receive an education. Like Jefferson, Washington was not so naive as to think that education was similar in all parts of the world. Students not only learned the basics of writing, literature, and arithmetic, but also cultural values.65 European education would instill principles anathema to a republic in America’s young men. A national university was the only remedy to this problem. Third, the national university was a way for America to enhance its standing on the world stage. Washington was not a strict isolationist. He did not want to involve America in a futile European war, but neither did he want to close America off to the outside world. A national university would ensure that American boys had an appropriate place to study and learn, and, perhaps, the institution would become a magnet pulling students from the old world to the new. The commissioners for Washington, D.C. suggested as much in their 1796 memorial to the House of Representatives.66 Washington believed America had the chance to set an example to the rest of the world, but the only way this could be achieved was through sound leadership. The national university would produce sound leaders with unassailable principles. The reason Washington most often gave for establishing a university was its nationalizing effects. This idea was not present in his first public mention of the university, but it quickly moved to the forefront of his reasoning. After his correspondence with Henry Knox in 1790, the university as a unifying force became the dominant trope in the president’s

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writings on the subject. In Washington’s ideal university youth from different parts of the country would assemble and through discussion and the “collision of sentiment” produce friendship and deflate local prejudices and jealousies.67 Washington focused on the nation’s youth because he had grown dismayed at the increasing bitterness and partisan nature of politics. He witnessed the falling out between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, and even his own reputation was not sacred from the increasingly divisive newspaper wars. Not only would a national university help young men form friendships that would last lifetimes, it would also spread “systematic ideas through all parts of this rising EMPIRE,” thereby quelling sectionalism. Washington had spent most of his life struggling for a united nation, and with the present generation of leadership lost to partisan warfare, he looked to the future to restore the consensus of his early days as president. Lastly, Washington saw that the national university would spread knowledge throughout the country. Washington believed the main problem with a republican, or democratic government, was “the people (not always seeing) must feel before they act; this is productive of errors and temporary evils.”68 That is, the people in a republic did not base their actions on reasoned and logical judgments, but rather on emotion. This was due to a lack of knowledge. It was not that they did not see the problem, but rather that they could not see the problem. Indeed, Washington devoted a good part of the education section of his first annual message to Congress to discussing the benefits that improved education would have on people’s knowledge. They would be able to know their rights. Education would allow the public to know the difference between “oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority.” Most importantly, people would be able to know the line between liberty and licentiousness.69 This sentiment is echoed in his Farewell Address when Washington lectured his countrymen that the nature of America’s governmental structure relied on the public opinion. Therefore, it was “essential that public opinion should be enlightened.”70 Washington has traditionally been portrayed as a conservative elitist. While he certainly retained some of the pretensions of the aristocratic Virginia planter class, his service to his country had allowed some of the democratic spirit to creep into the president’s thinking. His university would be open to all men of talent in the hopes that the diffusion of knowledge would lead to a greater self-awareness on the part of America’s citizens. Washington realized, before many of his countrymen did, that an informed citizenry was one of the integral parts of a functioning republic. Samuel Blodget was not the last to try to use Washington’s name to advance the cause of the national university. After his death, several newspapers called for a joint mausoleum-university in the capital city

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to honor the ex-president. Washington’s body would be removed from Mt. Vernon and placed in the mausoleum on the grounds of the university. The plan faltered over the public’s hesitation over the mausoleum part of the plan. As one writer so aptly stated it, the general himself would look askew at the plan to build a monument because while he may have wanted a university he definitely did not “want his friends to protect his ashes.”71 John Quincy Adams summoned Washington’s ghost in his first message to Congress in 1825. Had Washington still been living, he would have rejoiced in the establishment of the military academy at West Point, but looking at the city which bore his name he would find the site for the national university still “bare and barren.”72 Fifty-two years, and one civil war later, Rutherford B. Hayes again invoked Washington’s name and his “cherished hopes” in order to push the idea of a university.73 However, all appeals to Washington’s memory were in vain. The national university was never established. Though Americans always maintained a fond, perhaps even worshipful, view of the first president, these good feelings were never enough to sway them to fully embrace one of Washington’s chief projects. Even during his lifetime Washington’s influence seemed to fade. During the 1796 Congressional debate over the Washington, D.C. Commissioner’s request to hold money for the university in trust, Representative John Nicholas said that Washington had issued the call for a university because it was the last time he would address the Congress. Just because Washington suggested it, did not mean that the House had to act on it.74 Washington spent the last quarter century of his life fighting to give his nation freedom. In his mind the only way to achieve freedom was to ensure the country’s unity, independence, and security. The national university was to be a palladium against increasingly sectionalism, and the infiltration of hostile foreign ideas. The failure to heed Washington’s advice did not doom the country to civil war; rather, it signaled that the great man’s influence was eroding in the face of the growing persuasiveness of the two-party system. Washington never fell from his perch atop the Mt. Olympus of American political figures, but the public turned him into a living monument and forgot his actual beliefs about the nation’s future.

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QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER 1) How did Washington’s views on education and the national university change during the 1790s? What events led Washington to the conclusion that a national university was necessary?

2) Using Washington’s own words from his annual message to Congress in 1796, explain how his vision would produce an institution that might erase sectional differences and promote democracy?

3) Do you agree with Staude’s assertion that Washington’s plan would have helped democratize America in the early nineteenth century?

4) Compare and contrast the different types of schools that existed at the end of the eighteenth century. Discuss the purpose of education and how it changes after the American Revolution. Did the concept of equality, as stipulated in the Declaration of Independence, mean that American citizens would be entitled to an education?

h IN THEIR WORDS: A NATIONAL UNIVERSITY Excerpt from George Washington’s Eighth Annual Message to Congress, December 7, 1796 I have heretofore proposed to the consideration of Congress the expediency of establishing a national university and also a military academy. The desirableness of both these institutions has so constantly increased with every new view I have taken of the subject that I cannot omit the opportunity of once for all recalling your attention to them. The assembly to which I address myself is too enlightened not to be fully sensible how much a flourishing state of the arts and sciences contributes to national prosperity and reputation True it is that our country, much to its honor, contains many seminaries of learning highly respectable and useful; but the funds upon which they rest are too narrow to command the ablest professors in the different de-

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partments of liberal knowledge for the institution contemplated, though they would be excellent auxiliaries. Amongst the motives to such an institution, the assimilation of the principles, opinions, and manners of our countrymen by the common education of a portion of our youth from every quarter well deserves attention. The more homogenous our citizens can be made in these particulars the greater will be our prospect of permanent union; and a primary object of such a National Institution should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a Republic what species of knowledge can be equally important and what duty more pressing on its legislature than to patronize a plan for communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the Country?

h NOTES 1. For one of the first references to a national university in the independent United States, see David W. Robson, “Pennsylvania’s ‘Lost’ National University: Johan Forster’s Plan,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 102, no. 3 (1978): 364–374. 2. Benjamin Rush to Richard Price, Philadelphia, 25 May 1786, in Letters, ed. H. Lyman Butterfield (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society), 1:388; and Benjamin Rush, “Address to the People of the United States,” The American Museum, January 1787, 8–11. 3. Benjamin Rush, “Thoughts Upon the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic,” in Essays on Education in the Early American Republic, ed. Frederick Rudolph (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University), 9–23. On republicanism, see Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969). 4. Rush, “Thoughts Upon the Mode of Education,” 16–23. 5. Rush, “Address to the People of the United States,” 8. 6. Samuel H. Smith, “Remarks on Education: Illustrating the Close Connection Between Virtue and Wisdom,” and Samuel Knox, “An Essay on the Best System of Liberal Education, Adapted to the Genius of the Government of the United States,” in Essays on Education in the Early American Republic, 170, 312. 7. David W. Robson, Educating Republicans: The College in the Era of the American Revolution, 1750–1800 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 229. 8. Siobhan Moroney, “Birth of a Canon: The Historiography of Early Republican Educational Thought,” History of Education Quarterly 39, no. 4 (1999): 486–487. 9. Rush, “Address to the People of the United States,” 10. 10. Ibid. 11. Benjamin Rush, “Plan of a Federal University,” The American Museum, November 1788, 442–443.

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12. Ibid., 444. 13. Ibid., and Robson, Educating Republicans, 231. 14. John Fenno, “Importance of Proper System of Education—Establishment of a Federal University Recommended,” The American Museum, October 1789, 291. 15. Ibid. 16. Knox, 358. 17. Ibid., 367. 18. Smith, 212. 19. Ibid., 222–223. 20. Rush, “Plan of a Federal University,” 444. 21. Ibid., 444. 22. David Madsen, The National University: The Enduring Dream of the USA (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1966), 18. 23. For details of Washington’s youth and his education see Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, vol. 1, Young Washington (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1947), 74–178. 24. Paul K. Longmore, The Invention of George Washington (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 217. 25. Washington to David Humphreys, Mount Vernon, 25 July 1785, PGW:CS, 3:149. 26. Washington to Stephen Bloomer Balch, Mount Vernon, 30 October 1784, PGW:CS, 2:113. 27. Washington to Samuel Hanson, Mount Vernon, 26 July 1788, PGW:CS, 6:399–400. 28. Washington to James Craik, New York, 8 September 1789 in The Papers of George Washington: Presidential Series, eds. Dorothy Twohig, et al. (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 4:1–2. (Hereafter referred to as PGW:PS). 29. Washington to George Washington Parke Custis, Mount Vernon, 19 March 1798 in The Papers of George Washington: Retirement Series, eds. W. W. Abbot, et al. (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 2:149. (Hereafter referred to as PGW:RS). 30. See Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802 (New York: Free Press, 1975). 31. George Washington to Alexander Hamilton, Newburgh, 2 May 1783 in The Writings of George Washington, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1931–1944), 26:396–397. (Hereafter referred to as WGW) 32. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Max Farrand (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911–1937), 2:325, 616. 33. Washington to Samuel Chase, Mount Vernon, 5 January 1785, PGW:CS, 2:252. 34. George Washington to the United States Senate and House of Representatives, New York, 8 January 1790, PGW:PS, 543–549. 35. Henry Knox to Washington, New York, January 1790, PGW:PS, 5:80. 36. Washington to the Commissioners for the District of Columbia, Philadelphia, 28 January 1795, WGW, 34:106. 37. Washington to Edmund Randolph, Philadelphia, 15 December 1794, WGW, 34:59–60.

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38. Washington to Thomas Jefferson, Philadelphia, 15 March 1795, WGW, 34:148. 39. Washington to Richard Brooke, Philadelphia, 16 March 1795, WGW, 34. 40. See Ellis, 230–240 for Washington’s role in crafting his farewell. 41. Washington to Hamilton, Philadelphia, 1 September 1796, WGW, 35:199. 42. “Farewell Address,” 19 September 1796, WGW, 35:230. 43. George Washington to the United States Senate and House of Representatives, Philadelphia, 7 December 1796, WGW, 35:317. 44. Washington to St. George Tucker, Mount Vernon, 30 May 1797, PGW:RS, 1:163. 45. See Edward G. Lengel, General George Washington: A Military Life (New York: Random House, 2005), 359–371 for information on Washington’s appointment as commander-in-chief in 1798. 46. Bob Arnebeck, Through a Fiery Trial: Building Washington, 1790–1800 (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1991), 271. 47. “The Will of George Washington,” 9 July 1799, PGW:RS, 4:482–483. 48. Ibid. 49. The Gazette of the United States, July 5, 1795. 50. For the commencement references see Connecticut Courant, September 16, 1799, and New York Gazette, September 17, 1799. For notice of the debating society see Columbian Centinel, January 25, 1797. 51. The Gazette of the United States, July 22, 1795. 52. Albany Gazette, December 19, 1796. 53. Alexander White to James Madison, 2 December 1796, The James Madison Papers, Series 1: General Correspondence and Related Items, 1723–1859, Library of Congress. 54. American State Papers, 10, Miscellaneous 1:153–154. (Hereafter referred to as ASP: Misc.). 55. “Proceedings December 26, 1796,” Annals of Congress, House of Representatives, 4th Congress, 2nd Session, ed. Joseph Gales, Sr. (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1849), 1697. 56. Ibid., 1701. 57. Ibid., 1699. 58. Ibid., 1697. 59. Ibid., 1702. 60. Ibid., 1701. 61. “Proceedings December 27, 1796,” Ibid., 1706. Madsen, 34–38. 62. Washington to the United States Congress, 7 December 1796, WGW, 35. 63. Washington to George Chapman, Mount Vernon, 15 December 1784, PGW: CS, 2:138–139. 64. Washington to the Officials of Washington College, New York, 11 July 1789, PGW:PS, 3:177–178. 65. Castel, 298. 66. ASP: Misc., 1:153. 67. Washington to Brooke, WGW, 34. 68. In a letter to Edward Newenham on Nov. 25, 1785 Washington used the cited phrase “republican” describing a government of the people. However, in

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similarly phrased letters to David Humphreys and Henry Knox in March 1787 Washington replaced the word “republican” with “democratic.” Washington to Edward Newenham, Mount Vernon, 25 November 1785, PGW: CS, 3:387. 69. Washington to Congress, 8 January 1790, PGW:PS, 548–549. 70. “Farewell Address,” WGW, 35:230. 71. Alexandria Advertiser, June 14, 1802; and The Independent Chronicle, June 28, 1802. 72. John Quincy Adams, “First Annual Message to Congress,” 6 December 1825, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index .php?pid=29467 (accessed November 2, 2008). 73. Rutherford B. Hayes, “First Annual Message to Congress,” 3 December 1877, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index .php?pid=29518 (accessed November 5, 2008). 74. “Proceedings December 27, 1796,” Annals of Congress, 1706.

3 ✛

No Acknowledged Standard: The Female Seminary Curriculum of the Early Nineteenth Century Emily Conroy-Krutz

W

hen educational reformers in the early nineteenth century debated what to name the new schools for women, Professor Edward Hitchcock, a trustee at what would become Mount Holyoke Seminary, suggested that this new experiment be called a “pangynaskean,” for “whole-woman making.”1 These schools, ultimately called seminaries, would introduce large numbers of young women to the sciences, higher math, literature, geography, foreign languages, and even the classics while stressing a moral and religious education, and did indeed aim to create “whole women.” With great care, educators built a new curriculum intended to prepare young women for the world in which they lived, one marked by a changing economy, political partisanship, and social reform movements. While the early nineteenth century has generally been seen as a period of separation between the experiences of men and women, a comparison between the female seminary curriculum and that of male institutions (both at the academy and college level) reveals a remarkable amount of overlap. A Troy Seminary parent did not overstate when she wrote that the seminary “place[d] women on a level with men in point of education.”2 One student found that the seminaries demonstrated women’s abilities in “the abstruse sciences,” with seminary graduates “capable of fitting youth for College.”3 In both theory and content, the seminary 55

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curriculum blurred the lines between what historians have identified as separate spheres in the first half of the nineteenth century. In this essay, careful attention to the texts and subjects students encountered in seminaries reveals the ambiguities of republican womanhood.4 Educators in the early nineteenth century developed the seminary as a place for young women of the middle classes to receive an education equal to that of their brothers at college, but with the expectation that the curriculum would enable women to better fulfill their duties as republican women. The seminary was only one of many educational reforms developed in the years between 1790 and 1840.5 Reformers increasingly critiqued the still trenchant classical curriculum of elite and upwardly mobile middleclass men. These young men spent their school years first at academy and then at college working almost entirely in Latin and Greek, only moving on to the sciences, mathematics, and moral philosophy in their junior and senior years of college. This classical liberal arts curriculum was designed both as intellectual discipline and professional preparation. With the early republic, however, reformers began asserting that an American education ought to be practical, based on the English language and focused on the sciences.6 The goal of the new curriculum was to “render the mass of people more homogenous, and thereby fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government.”7 The new English course of study offered at academies provided an expanded curriculum to young men unable to afford college. These students studied mathematics, the English language, moral science, and increasingly the sciences. Their education was designed to help them fulfill a role of republican male citizenship, which required a familiarity with the English language, excellent reasoning skills, and some rhetorical powers. These same subjects were studied by their sisters, who were expected to fill a slightly different, if complementary, republican role. The creation of the seminary curriculum was very much part of these reforms. As early as 1792, with the founding of Sarah Hale’s Litchfield Female Seminary, a subtle shift in emphasis began from the “ornamental” to “solid” branches of education for women. College-level subjects including Latin, higher mathematics, and moral philosophy were added to the curriculum. At seminary, young women would use the same textbooks their brothers would encounter at academy or college. Hale defended this “untried experiment” in women’s education by insisting that the apparent curricular egalitarianism was not threatening, because “they would be put to different purposes.” For boys, the study of geography, for example, would be useful in future careers as merchants, while for girls, it would help them appreciate the value of living in a Christian republic.8 Seminary supporters were explicit in their desire to create a curriculum that would create and nurture a certain type of femininity oriented toward the fam-

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ily, the public good, and complement the masculine citizenry; the seminaries, in other words, set out to create republican women. Importantly, they did this through imitation and emulation of a curriculum designed to create male citizens. Emma Willard, founder of the Troy Female Seminary in 1821, noted the “absurdity of sending women to college,” and insisted that the seminary would be “as different from those [schools] appointed to the other sex, as the female character and duties are from the male.”9 Even as she said this, Willard and reformers including Catharine Beecher, and Mary Lyon constructed a curriculum increasingly similar to what young men received at academy and college. This shift in both the subjects studied and the textbooks used did not go unnoticed by contemporary commentators. Educators, reformers, parents, and students vigorously debated the meanings and the value of this advanced female education through the early nineteenth century. Throughout this period, reformers argued against claims that education would somehow render women less feminine or less likely to be satisfied with domestic pursuits. Instead, the seminary curriculum would make women more prepared to fulfill their feminine duties. These arguments rested on the cultural assumption that men and women were different—not of “different order[s] of being,” but rather, occupying different “appropriate spheres” determined by “nature.”10 These gender differences were so innate that to some it almost did not matter of what the curriculum consisted, for “Nature has pointed out the appropriate sphere of each sex too distinctly to be mistaken, and all the distinguishing characteristics which she ever intended, would exist as completely, and more so, without the intermeddling of human theory.” Since “nature” would determine the effects of schooling, it only remained for educators to remember that “Animal life is common to both sexes, and in each requires the same food to sustain it. Mind is as common to both sexes, and in each requires the same mental food to sustain its vigor and enhance its growth.”11 The goal of educating women like men in order to make them better women justified women’s education as necessary to the health and prosperity of the nation, through women’s understood roles as mothers and wives. Over and again, seminary founders, teachers, and students voiced these sentiments and restated the goals of the female seminary—to create, as one school phrased it, “right-minded women, physically and morally trained for the great battle of life.”12 Even as republican argumentation supported the idea that an advanced education for women would not disrupt the gender order, there remained a tension between the content of seminary education and what women were expected to do with it. While one orator on “The Education of females” insisted that women’s education should be “equivalent” to men’s, he explained that this was not the same as being “identical, or even equal

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in extent,” since subjects and “modes” of education must differ as “their respective duties and destinations are so widely different.”13 This simultaneous equation and differentiation between women’s and men’s curricula was common. When Emma Willard decried Middlebury College’s refusal to let women sit in on classes, she argued that women should have access to men’s intellectual culture to make “the companionship of wedded life . . . purer and stronger,” and to “give to the world nobler sons and daughters.”14 While these justifications of marital and filial benefits may seem conservative, they were used to advance radical claims about women’s education. As the Examining Committee at Troy described in 1849, this desired “charm of companionship” between women and men could only “be rendered dearer and closer, by similarities of taste, which always arise from similarity in mental habits.” Such a goal necessitated that “the elements of study of our young men and women, so far at least as the undergraduate course extends, become as much as possible the same—until our daughters be better versed in the ancient classics, Mathematics, Rhetoric, and the natural sciences,” which was indeed what the seminaries set out to do.15 The demands of the new republic were hardly the only factors contributing to the shifts in women’s education in these years. The expansion of the market economy in these years was also important, as the seminaries became the site of education for the daughters of the rising middle classes.16 Not only did the seminaries create an educated class of young women, it also addressed what Godey’s Ladies Book called the “flaw from the outset in our educational plans”—the assumption that young women would be supported by husbands after graduation.17 The educational expansion across the country created a need for skilled teachers; soon, teaching became, in the words of Mary Lyon, “really the business of almost every useful woman.”18 A seminary graduate could teach higher subjects and thus command a higher salary; accordingly, many families saw their daughters’ education as a bulwark against downward mobility. Educational reformers designed the seminary curriculum to meet the changing ideological and economic landscape of the early nineteenth century. This new curriculum was modeled on the male academy and college curricula, and introduced female students to the sciences, mathematics, foreign languages, history and geography, the English language, and theological and philosophical texts. In the classroom, female students used textbooks that were either identical or similar in content and manner of presentation to those used by male students in their junior and senior years of college. These curricular advancements showed enormous commitment on the part of educators who, especially in the early years, turned to self-training and the aid of sympathetic men in order to be able to present these new subjects to women. Emma Willard, for example,

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counted on her college-educated nephew to teach her, and further taught herself trigonometry, conic sections, and Enfield’s Natural Philosophy in order to be able to teach these subjects.19 She later described sleepless nights as she learned “one by one, the branches which I wished to introduce, and I taught them to those on whom I afterwards made teachers.”20 This dedication begins to suggest some of the pioneering aspects of the seminary education. Subject by subject, the seminary curriculum introduced young women to new branches of knowledge and thinking. The sciences are one of the most noticeable additions to the curriculum, and training was a principal problem in their introduction. How could female students be instructed in the sciences if their teachers had never learned them? Female teachers responded to this problem both by selftraining and working with sympathetic college professors. Emma Willard encountered the power of these relationships when she moved from Vermont to upstate New York. Whereas Middlebury College did not allow Willard and her students to sit in on classes, the move to Troy, New York put her in contact with Prof. Amos Eaton of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In 1819, Willard and Eaton began corresponding about obtaining “a cheap Chemical Laboratory at the Ladies’ Academy [Waterford Female Seminary, a prototype for Troy].” In the same letter, Eaton offered to lecture at the school once a week, while training Willard to take over the class herself. 21 Even as he promised that she would be able to teach geology and botany lectures without his assistance after the first course, he continued teaching at Troy Seminary through 1827. He often taught the students at Troy by giving public lectures, which Trojan men and women could also attend for a fee (thus defraying costs). Eaton’s goal, however, was to train female teachers to lead classes themselves within the seminary setting. In 1824, Eaton offered a free course for female students (whom he referred to as “tutoresses”) who wanted to teach chemistry.22 The women he trained did indeed “go on alone:” Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, one of Eaton’s students, went on to author numerous textbooks in botany, chemistry and geology.23 Mary Lyon, too, was trained by Eaton in 1824 and 1825, and accordingly introduced chemistry to the curriculum first at Ipswich Female Seminary and, later, at Mount Holyoke. Whether taught by female teachers or male professors, the science curriculum generally began with natural philosophy, and then progressed to chemistry. Botany, geology, astronomy, and anatomy or physiology were also popular courses included at most female seminaries. While science was widely taught, and students seemed to enjoy it greatly, its usefulness was not clear to all observers. Olympia Brown, a student at Mount Holyoke in 1855, recalled one Amherst professor who told the seminarians that he did not expect them to remember anything beyond what would “make

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you intelligent in conversation.” Educator Joseph Emerson seemed similarly unsure of how “deeply or extensively learned in Chemistry” young women ought to be, out of fear that it might divert their attention from “the duties of life, and from the nobler sciences relating to mind, as Grammar, Rhetoric, History, Intellectual Philosophy, &c.”24 Yet these examples stand out as anomalies. In a general sense, as Brown recalled, “the object of education” suggested by the Amherst professor differed greatly from “the ideas of our regular Holyoke teachers.”25 Turning to the texts that these teachers used, a more specific difference emerges. While Emerson assigned his students a lower-level “conversation text” on chemistry, none of the other seminaries under study did so.26 Rather, they chose from a wide variety of college-level texts. While the standard-format texts assigned to seminary students often differed from those assigned at colleges, they contained similar, or identical, material. The First Principles of Chemistry, by Yale professor Benjamin Silman, was one popular text, assigned both at Yale and a number of seminaries including Auburn, Hartford, and Mt. Holyoke. Additional variation seems largely due to the wide availability of science texts—the colleges themselves rarely assigned the same books. All were part of the same body of scholarship, however, and cited a common group of works. Given the wide selection of available books, the assignment of collegiate texts at seminaries suggests an affirmation of women’s science education outside of its purely domestic applications. As in their science courses, seminary students encountered the same texts in mathematics courses that young men used. However, the trajectory of the mathematics courses at the female seminaries reveal particularly well the ambiguous relationship position of the seminaries relative to male educational institutions. Mathematics was taught in a sequence beginning with arithmetic and gradually building to the higher subjects. Accordingly, men’s colleges did not cover the basic subject of arithmetic—it was a prerequisite. Instead, the colleges began with algebra or, in the case of Yale, with geometry. The academies covered arithmetic; indeed, it was one of the few non-classical subjects on the classical academy curriculum. Female seminaries, on the other hand, covered the entirety of the mathematical series, beginning with arithmetic and progressing to higher mathematics. Like their college-bound brothers, female students used Adams’ popular New Arithmetic text. In geometry, virtually all schools assigned either Legendre’s or Euclid’s Elements of Geometry.27 The continuity of texts in mathematics suggests a comfort with women’s mathematical education that may have been more problematic in the other fields. The uncertain purpose of women’s scientific education is completely lacking in discussions of mathematics. This can be in part explained by the practicality of mathematical

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knowledge for housewives, but also by the mental discipline which mathematics was supposed to give students. Jeremiah Day, a popular textbook author, argued that within the college curriculum, the “principal value” of mathematics was its logic, and the creation of “sound reasoners, rather than expert mathematicians.” “No other subject,” he argued, “affords a better opportunity for exemplifying the rules of correct thinking.”28 This was a goal not only for young men, but for women as well. Indeed, the occasional teaching of bookkeeping at seminaries and texts designed for women, suggests that the practical value of women’s mathematical training was also the competence with economic transactions required of housekeepers. The combined mental and practical benefits of mathematical training made it an unproblematic subject for female education. In addition to teaching the sciences and mathematics, seminaries enjoy the reputation of being early training grounds in the modern languages. In a period in which the classical languages had a firm grip on the college curriculum, with modern languages struggling for entry, female seminaries trod the opposite path. French, in particular, held a prominent place in the seminary curriculum. For some contemporaries, this showed a concern for ornament on the part of educators and parents. Indeed, Joseph Emerson urged his students to avoid studying French at the expense of more “useful” subjects, as it was “vain,” ornamental, and useless to American students.29 The classics held an important symbolic role in the education of both men and women in the antebellum period. The permanence of the classics on the male curriculum granted Latin and Greek high symbolic meaning for female students. Their introduction into the curriculum of a female seminary, then, marked the school as distinct from the earlier institutions of female education. Women’s mastery of these subjects could, like science and mathematics, reveal the intellectual equality of men and women. Unlike science and mathematics, though, the classics were not widely assigned. While every college and male academy offered both Latin and Greek, only the more firmly established seminaries included Latin in their curricula, and Greek was an extreme rarity.30 At those seminaries where the classics were taught, the general justification involved the mental discipline that a classical education encouraged. William Russel echoed the opinion of many when he supported women’s classical education for its ability to discipline the mind in “a form excellently adapted to an ennobling influence on human character.”31 In reply to those men who disapproved, he asked them to reflect on how they themselves were “indebted to that long-sustained, arduous application of [their] powers, which was rendered necessary by the very extent of the subject to which his own studious years were devoted.”32 Women, too, should see the benefits of such training.

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All languages were elective classes in the female seminaries, and did not form part of the required curriculum in the earlier years. As schools became more secure, they occasionally added Latin to the required course load, as at Mount Holyoke in 1845 and Charlestown in 1857.33 Otherwise, students needed parental permission to take languages, as they did with other elective classes in the arts. The prices of the different elective offerings demonstrate the comparative value assigned to the subject in the schools. As courses moved toward absorption into the standard curriculum, their additional costs dropped. For example, scientific lecture courses gradually shifted from costing a few dollars a term, to being free but elective, to finally becoming part of the regular course. When Latin and French courses cost considerably less than the ornamental electives, as indeed they generally did, educators deemed the languages more central to women’s education. What is more, these courses were understood to extend the time required for completion of the program. While a music or art course certainly would not add a year to one’s studies, the catalogue of the Charlestown Female Seminary in 1844 explained that while the English course was designed to take three years, “for those who attend to French and Latin, more time may be required.”34 These differences in valuation, both in monetary and temporal terms, indicate the revolution that had occurred within the female seminary in regard to what aspects of education were deemed important for young women. If languages were an optional part of the curriculum, history and geography were not; educators considered them among the most important subjects of women’s education.35 Female students were almost guaranteed to encounter United States, European, and ancient history in their time at seminary, and were likely to learn ecclesiastical history, as well.36 Samuel Goodrinch’s United States History was one of the most commonly assigned texts, and was noted for its “simple, concise and luminous view of a subject, which in its nature is peculiarly complex and intricate. . . . The style is easy, neat, remarkably perspicuous, and suited to improve the taste of the learner.”37 Worcester’s Elements of History was also a widely assigned text. Unlike most other subjects, however, no author held a monopoly over the generally assigned texts. While the texts themselves varied, the method of learning history was generally the same at different schools, and indicates the level of detail that female students were expected to absorb. Emerson outlined the method of teaching history in his appendix to Samuel Whelpley’s Compend of History. Students were to read the texts multiple times, each time with an eye to a new set of questions, and were expected to learn both historical and geographical information. In presenting the information that they had learned at recitation, students simultaneously reviewed the subject and practiced their oratory skills, “as it respects deliberation,

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pauses, emphasis, cadence, etc.”38 Thus, the pedagogy of history was interdisciplinary, encompassing geography and oratory, both for male and female students. Geography accompanied history as a frequently taught subject, beginning with a focus on the extremely local and gradually expanding to cover other parts of the country, the world, and eventually, other time periods. After learning elementary geography, students would learn about the history and culture of the location that they were studying, thus connecting the study to political, cultural, and religious history. They would further be expected to draw maps by hand from memory. In their popular Universal Geography, William Woodbridge and Emma Willard suggested sample questions to be asked of any country, having to do with “general characteristics” of the region, the “state of civilization,” government, religion, “general character,” climate, economy, and the “state of learning and education.”39 Thus, one of the lessons students were expected to gain from their geographic studies was the benefits of living in America, a Christian republic with both agriculture and manufacturing bolstering its economy, and in which even women were granted an education. The civic implications of this aspect of women’s education were supplemented at some seminaries by political texts. Both Troy and Charlestown Female Seminaries, for example, taught constitutional law (as did Brown, Amherst, Harvard, and Yale Colleges); political economy was taught at Geneva, Charleston, and Hartford Seminaries, and a general “politics” subject was covered at most well-established female seminaries. Most seminaries taught some aspect of United States government to their pupils, often turning to Sullivan’s Political Class Book in the 1830s as their text.40 This book described its goal as educating “those who are to be citizens,” and to “enable them to understand the institutions of their own country.”41 Part of this civic education includes an explicit discussion of the legal rights of men and women both in marriage and when single. In the text, Sullivan insisted that “universal suffrage” had been achieved by the time of publication. Universal white male suffrage had indeed taken hold by this time, but the neglect of these qualifying adjectives reveals the unquestioning normativity of women’s disenfranchisement when coverture, which subsumed a wife’s political and legal identity into that of her husband, was still in place. What is significant here is not so much the political reality, as it is the education of the female student to be fully aware of that political reality. The nature of female citizenship was complex at this time, and the female seminary gave students political knowledge, while teaching them that they would never themselves exercise that knowledge as voters, and perhaps instilling the wish that they could.42 The seminary curriculum in this way reflected the contradictions of republican womanhood.

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Philosophical texts were also central to the educations of both seminary and college students. In this category, female seminaries tended to assign books read by college juniors and seniors. Most of the studies of the seminary and college students were related to theological themes, but direct religious and moral training had a prominent position on campuses beyond explaining the religious meaning behind other subjects. Male and female students all encountered texts like Butler’s Analogy, Wayland’s Moral Science, and the writings of Paley. If anything, female religious and moral training was more extensive: female principals often gave weekly lectures to their students on moral issues, and they assigned religious literature like John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Cowper’s Task and Young’s Night Thoughts.43 The seminaries were also a hotbed of religious revivalism, suggesting that the manner of teaching these texts may not have been purely academic.44 Perhaps this is not surprising, considering that cultural duties that women were expected to fulfill after graduation were so connected with religious and moral characteristics. Indeed, when president of Troy Female Seminary, Almira Lincoln Phelps found that the formation of “religious habits” was “above all,” the purpose of education.45 If religious studies were a central component of the female curriculum, so too was the study of the English language. As an orator at Abbott Female Seminary explained in 1843, the “extensive, systematic, and critical study” of English was uncontroversial, even as debates existed “in relation to the extent to which girls should pursue the study of mathematics, or on the advantages arising to them from the study of the ancient languages.”46 In addition to studying literature, female students learned to write well; virtually all seminaries assigned rhetoric and logic texts, and weekly composition assignments were part of the general seminary curriculum. English language training for seminary students began with the basics of grammar and spelling and quickly progressed to the higher branches of the English language. It was important to start with the basics, for, as Joseph Emerson explained, seminary students might have been acquainted with parsing, but would have a limited understanding of the larger meaning of her work.47 At this point, she would be introduced to one of the popular grammar textbooks assigned in the seminaries. Murray’s Grammar, or the edited versions by Pond and Fisk, were widely assigned, and gained Emerson’s praise as “probably the best for our use that have yet been published.”48 The popular textbooks differed in deductive and inductive methodology, although there does not appear to have been a gender difference in the preference for either style. Rhetoric textbooks were also assigned across gender lines with little distinction between the texts assigned to women and to men. A major distinction, however, lies in the institutions at which the texts were assigned.

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Rhetoric was taught at the seminary and college levels, but was not covered in the college preparatory academic curriculum. Samuel Newman, the author of the most popular rhetoric text, wrote that the advantages of this study included the “cultivation of the taste,” “skill in the use of language,” “skill in literary criticism,” and the “formation of a good style.”49 As the full title of Newman’s work suggests, he illustrated his points with examples from literature. This style can be compared with another popular rhetoric text, George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric, which focused on the attainment of eloquence and adopted a more pensive manner.50 Interestingly, Blair directly addressed the eloquence of popular assemblies, the pulpit, and the bar, thus directing his attention to the needs of his male readers.51 Perhaps this explains Emerson’s expression of frustration with the text: “Nearly half of it [Blair’s abridged text], relates to subjects, which I do not wish my pupils to know.”52 Like rhetoric textbooks, logic texts were for the most part assigned similarly to men and women. Logic was another subject not covered in the preparatory academies, although both seminaries and colleges taught it. With the exception of Isaac Watts’ On the Mind, a preparatory text that was assigned extensively in seminaries although not at all in colleges, female students used texts on the same level of difficulty as their male counterparts.53 Even those seminaries that did use Watts, with the exception of Emerson’s Byfield Seminary, did so in conjunction with other logic textbooks, using Watts as an introductory text in the lower years. Composition writing was the culmination of English language training for seminary students, bringing together the skills that they had learned from rhetoric and logic to create essays. The topics varied; sometimes assigned by the teacher and other times chosen by the student. Whether by assignment or choice, the compositions tended to focus on sentimental or moralist themes. Occasionally, students would find a theme in historical events. The students at the Bucknall sisters’ seminary wrote on “The search for Happiness,” “The New World and the New Man,” “Chivalry,” “The True Glory of a Nation,” and, perhaps most interestingly, “Intellectual qualities as possessed by Man and Woman,” among other topics.54 Betsey Huntting, a seminary student in the 1840s, wrote on “The Discovery of North America by Norwegians,” “Man Proposes but God Disposes,” “Comparative Value of the Mariner’s Compass and the Art of Painting” (in which she found painting to be the more valuable), “Uses and Abuses of Laughter,” and other topics.55 The Parker text included similar subject headings. Annually, the better compositions from the year were read aloud at the public examinations. Often they would also be reprinted in the school catalogues, drawing further attention to the skill of seminary students.

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Student compositions reveal the level of intellectual development of seminary students through their rhetorical complexity (or simplicity), and reveal the themes that textbook writers, teachers, and students found important in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. One of Parker’s exercises consisted of writing essays from provided outlines. Such an exercise not only illuminates how students were expected to frame arguments, it also shows what Parker felt students should think on topics as significant as “Modesty,” “Contemplation,” “Generosity,” “Solitude,” “Affectation,” and “The Necessity of Submission to Teachers,” among other themes. For example, an essay on modesty should discuss: “1. Modesty, a refined compliment to those we address. 2. All are friends to the modest, and enemies to the presumptuous man. 3. Modesty, a proof of good sense. 4. Modesty, the peculiar ornament of the female sex.”56 Parker’s textbook, while not widely distributed, was assigned to both male and female students. What must it have been like as a female seminary student to write an essay on modesty as the “peculiar ornament of the female sex?” One student’s composition on the “Intellectual Qualities as possessed by Man and Woman” might help to answer this question. This composition is unfortunately both undated and anonymous. It was written at The Young Ladies Institute, run by the Bucknall sisters between 1840 and 1880 alternately in Newark, New York City, and New Brunswick. The author opened her composition with a brief discussion of the “vexed and widely discussed question” of men’s supposed intellectual superiority over women; she found that it was not a matter of ability, but of opportunity that had kept women “as a class” from “equal[ing] men in attaining a high degree of development and culture.” She went on to describe men as historically tyrannical, “sternly den[ying]” access to education, and women as historically forced to be “the physical drudge and slave of man.” Alongside these stark statements, the author pays much attention to the “respective spheres” of women and men, finding women superior in intuition, emotion, moral force and correctness, and inferior in reason, planning, and public affairs. Regardless of relative abilities, she argues, “surely her commanding and necessarily powerful influence in the family demands that she should be thoroughly educated, and qualified for her position.” She concludes, then, with an understanding of natural gender differences that are quite typical of seminary students and teachers. Yet her argument also relies on an understanding of gender differences based on opportunity, also typical of her fellow students and teachers.57 What is remarkable about this essay and indeed, the seminary curriculum as a whole, is the way that these two strains of argument coexist, both challenging and accepting the gendered order, at times within the same composition. The seminary emerges here as a space in which young women were not only educated to be ideal republican women,

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but in which they gained the tools and ability to identify and articulate concerns with that system. As this survey of the content of the seminary curriculum suggests, the education young women received at the female seminaries of the early nineteenth century gave them access to college-level texts and subjects. Such an education was expected to create republican women who would act as rational and moral centers of the domestic sphere, and in many ways, it did. Yet in several important ways the curriculum, which intended to create republican mothers, ultimately set the stage for women to challenge the constraints of gendered republicanism. The scientific and career-oriented language of the curriculum affected not only women’s careers as teachers, but also the ways that they envisioned their duties at home and within their communities. Marriage and motherhood remained important for seminary graduates.58 The meaning of these roles, however, shifted in the early nineteenth century as a result of educational reforms and the birth of domestic economy. Domestic economy took the professional and scientific language of the mid-nineteenth century and applied it to women’s daily lives. Instead of envisioning housework as female skills passed from mother to daughter, domestic economy presented housework as a true profession that required specialized training. While not part of the curriculum, domestic economy was in many ways exactly what reformers expected the effects of a seminary curriculum to be—a feminine application of the higher subjects.59 Women’s domestic roles, moreover, did not negate their participations in the civic sphere. As Emma Willard advised students in 1844, there was no reason for women to believe that domestic duties encompassed all that women ought to do. While she advised them first to “perform well your duties in domestic life,” she urged the women to then “ask what part there is for you further to perform, which, while it advances the cause of your sex, may promote your country’s prosperity, or hinder its decline.”60 Willard went on to describe women’s potential to aid impoverished children, to build local schools, and to be “politically speaking . . . a mother to the children of her neighborhood.” Willard claimed a “political” identity for women through expanding the bounds of maternalism, and she was not the only one.61 Echoing this common justification of women’s benevolent work in the nineteenth century, Mary Lyon claimed that “all [women’s] duties, of whatever kind, are in an important sense, social and domestic,” distinguishing these private duties from men’s “public” duties.62 This language, indeed, was necessary for seminary graduates to maintain their respectability, and to insist that their education had not “unfit [them] for those household duties, and those quiet and retired employments for which [they were] destined.” After the contests over

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the justification of education itself for women, when some worried that graduates “will pant for the contests of the polemical and political areas; that she will ascend the pulpit and the tribune,” seminarians were careful in their language choice.63 These effects, further, emanated outward from the seminaries. As graduates went on to teach and found schools throughout the nation, they brought not only the new curriculum, but the new ideas about women’s education and women’s lives with them.64 The seminary curriculum attempted to maintain a delicate balance between gender difference and equality, between women occupying their own distinct spheres, and interacting with the larger realm of human life. The ultimate goal of these schools was to make “wise women,” as opposed to “splendid ladies.”65 Armed with her knowledge of higher mathematics, science, logic, grammar, rhetoric, and Latin, a seminary graduate would be “a true woman, resolved to do diligently her duty, to bear cheerfully her fate, an honor to her sex and a blessing to Society.”66 What women actually took away from their seminary education may have been a different matter. The seminary certainly produced a number of “true women,” but it also paved the way for a new sort of woman.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER 1) Conroy-Krutz examines several different institutions. Are there additional factors we might consider that would impact her argument, such as geography? How might these additional factors change her argument? 2) Based upon the examination report from the Troy Female Seminary in 1848, how did the seminary curriculum challenge commonly held notions about women’s roles in American society? 3) Would the emphasis on higher learning lead to changes in the public schools in the nineteenth century? How might we reconcile this chapter with the previous one? 4) Compare and contrast Conroy-Krutz’s argument to Linda Kerber’s in Women in the Republic.

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IN THEIR WORDS: THE TROY FEMALE SEMINARY AND CURRICULUM “Report of the Examining Committee of the Troy Female Seminary for the Academic Year Commencing March 3, 1847 and Ending February 16, 1848” in Troy Female Seminary Catalogue, 1848 (Troy, NY: 1848), 21–23. Permission from the Troy Female Seminary Collection of the Emma Willard School. The undersigned, having been appointed a Committee to attend the late Semi-Annual Examination of the Troy Female Seminary, respectfully submit to the public the following Report: The examination was continued through nine days—from Monday, the 7th, to Wednesday, the 16th instant, occupying from six to seven hours each day. The list of subjects in which the young ladies were examined during all this time, shows a very wide range; but, as only three or four studies were brought up in review before the Committee on each day, ample time was afforded for a thorough investigation of the attainments of every individual. The principal studies included in the examination were Arithmetic, Grammar, Geography, History, Astronomy, Natural Philosophy,—embracing Mechanics, Pneumatics and Hydrostatics,—Algebra, Geometry, Chemistry, Physiology, the French, German and Latin Languages, Rhetoric, Criticism, and Intellectual and Moral Philosophy. These are but part of a still greater variety of studies, both solid and ornamental, to which our attention was called; and among so many, the Committee, unable to notice all, are at a loss to specify any as deserving of more commendation than others. The few which we select, we design rather to exhibit our estimate of the whole. Among the elementary branches, the recitation in Geography gave undivided satisfaction to the Committee, and furnished abundant evidence both of the attainments of the pupils and of the efficiency of the method in which they had been instructed. Each scholar was requested to draw from memory upon the blackboard a map of some country, and then describe the same in minute detail. A variety of questions was addressed to each pupil by the Committee, the answers to which showed a practical acquaintance with that valuable branch of knowledge. In the great accuracy, facility, and neatness exhibited by this class in drawing their maps, it was evident that they were incidentally cultivating a taste for drawing, training the eye and the hand for such uses, at the same time that they were acquiring the more immediate object of their study. In the field of Natural Science, the Committee would designate Chemistry, Mechanics, and Hydrostatics, as furnishing evidence both of thorough instruction and laborious, successful application. These classes showed most

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No Acknowledged Standard The Committee would gladly add even a higher commendation to many other features of the school that came under the observation, the admirable order and propriety which characterized the deportment of the young ladies, the result, it seemed, of an inward, rather than an outward restraint, the kind and affectionate bearing between pupil and teacher, the gentle, quiet, but yet dignified and truly ladylike tone of authority which seemed to pervade every part of the school, and preside over every movement, without its exercise being seen anywhere, the happy blending of the useful and the ornamental, the solid and the refined, in their due proportion, and, above all, the high moral standard and the broad Catholic platform of a purely Evangelical and thoroughly Protestant Christianity, so early adopted and so consistently maintained, all these deserve notice among the higher excellencies of the school, as a claim to the affectionate fostering care of our own citizens, and the increased confidence of its patrons. But, while such is decidedly the character and aim of the school in the more solid and useful branches of education, the ornamental branches are by no means neglected. Specimens of Painting and Drawing were examined by the Committee which reflected the highest credit upon the pupils, and testified to the good taste, skill, and efficiency of the instruction they had received. In the department of Music, vocal and instrumental, advantages are enjoyed, in the scientific character, skill and ability of the teachers who have charge of this department, which the Committee, from a pretty extensive observation elsewhere, believe are unsurpasseds, is not unequalled in any other school in this country. And they are confident they hazard little in adding, that the same remark is applicable to the department of Modern Languages. In the French language they have never listened, even in the so-called French Schools, to more fluent, graceful and finished translations, thorough analysis, and practical acquaintance with the principles of the language, than the recent examination exhibited. The Committee cannot close this report without noticing one point more as worthy of special commendation. There is, perhaps, no qualification more generally undervalued, or more seldom attained, than a correct and graceful elocution. The Committee are of opinion that it should in all cases take precedence of very many things which occupy far more time in Female Education, and they are happy to believe, from the few specimens to which they were permitted to listen, in the reading of several well-written compositions, that this truly valuable accomplishment receives its due estimation and attention in this Institution. At the close of the examination, Diplomas were conferred by the Principal on thirteen young ladies, who had completed the full course of study and whose names are below. Previous to this, the large audience who filled to overflowing the new and spacious Hall of the Seminary, listened with the deepest interest and at-

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Chapter 3 tention, to a beautiful tribute to a former pupil and teacher—the late Mrs. Emma White. It was from the ready pen of one, to whom the cause of Female Education in this country is most deeply indebted, the Founder and former Principal of this Seminary, Mrs. EMMA WILLARD, and who, even in her retirement, is ever ready to step forward as the able supporter of a cause to whose best interests she has devoted a long and useful life. The Committee would venture to express the hope that this last tribute of her pen to that cause, may be given to the public in connection with the report. And they desire this, not less on account of its intrinsic value, than as a beautiful illustration of the principle on which the system of Education aimed at in this Seminary is based, that woman’s best preparation for the responsibilities and trials of life, is a thorough intellectual and moral training. From the Catalogue of the Seminary, which has just been published, the number of pupils during the last year, is shown to be 378; an evidence, the Committee are pleased to see, that it has lost none of its well-earned and nobly sustained reputation. That the smile of public approbation may ever rest where it is so justly due, is the earnest hope and prayer of the Committee. EDWARD LOUNSBERY, ISAAC MCCONIHE, JAMES FORSYTH, LELAND FAIRBANKS, JR., GILBERT ROBERTSON, JR.

h NOTES The author would like to thank Elizabeth Blackmar, Alice Kessler-Harris, Rosalind Rosenberg, Lara Vapnek, Ann Marie Wilson, Nancy Cott, and Laurel Ulrich for their comments and guidance. She would also like to thank the librarians at the Emma Willard School, Mount Holyoke College, and the Schlesinger and Gutman Libraries at Harvard University. 1. Elizabeth Alden Green, Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke: Opening the Gates (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1979), 127–8. 2. Elizabeth Mansfield to Mary Ann Mansfield, West Point, NY, May 1822. Student Correspondence, Troy Female Seminary Collection, Emma Willard School [TFS]. 3. Celia Greeme to “Uncle,” Troy Female Seminary, March 17, 1827. Student Correspondence, TFS. 4. Throughout the chapter, I rely on the historiography of what Mary Kelley calls “gendered republicanism,” by which women and men of this period were seen to have distinct roles under the social structure of republicanism. The ideal republican woman was a wife and mother who used her position within her family and social circle to influence male citizens to right behavior. This was a highly ambiguous role. Its logic could be easily applied to an expansive role women

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played in civic life and education, even as its argumentation viewed women primarily in their relationship to men. See especially Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 2006 and Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1986). 5. See Kerber, Women of the Republic. 6. Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1980), 118. 7. Richard Hofstadter and Wison Smith, eds. American Higher Education: A Documentary History. Vol. 1, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1961), 170. 8. Theodore and Nancy Sizer, Sally Schwager, Lynne Templeton Brickley, and Glee Krueger. To Ornament Their Minds: Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Academy, 1792–1833 (Litchfield, CT: The Litchfield Historical Society, 1993), 10. 9. Emma Willard, A Plan for Improving Female Education (Marietta, GA: Larlin Corp., 1987), 7. 10. “Female Education: An Address.” Magazine Articles and Pamphlets (1845), 5. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College [SSC]. 11. Ibid., 5. 12. Quote taken from Mt. Washington Boarding and Day School for Young Ladies, So. Boston, 1856 advertisement. Box 27, Folder “Mt. Washington Boarding and Day School for Young Ladies, So. Boston” Education Collection, SSC. For similar language, see also Ladies Collegiate Institute, “First Annual Catalogue” (1857), Box 27, “Ladies Collegiate Institute, Worceser, 1856, 1858.” Education Collection, SSC. High School for Girls, Boston (1826), Box 27, folder High School for Girls, Boston (1826). Education Collection, SSC. 13. “The Education of Females,” 8. SSC. 14. Brainerd, Ezra. “Life and Work in Middlebury, Vermont, of Emma Willard.” Education Collection, Box 2, Folder “Willard, Emma.” SSC. 15. Troy Female Seminary, “Report of the Examining Committee” in the “Catalogue of the Officers and Pupils of the Troy Female Seminary, for the Academic Year, Commencing September 10, 1849, and Ending July 24, 1850; Together with the Conditions of Admittance, &c.” (Troy, NY, 1850), 26. TFS. 16. On changing economic conditions of the time, see Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). The seminaries, while somewhat elite institutions, also showed a marked expansion to the middle classes. Scholarships were quite common; in exchange, graduates were expected to teach at the school for a few years. See David F. Allemindinger Jr., “Mount Holyoke Students Encounter the Need for Life-Planning, 1837–1850.” History of Education Quarterly 19, no. 1, (1979), 27–46; Kathryn Kish Sklar, “The Schooling of Girls and Changing Community Values in Massachusetts Towns, 1750–1820.” History of Education Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1993), 530–532. 17. Thomas W. Higginson, “What is the Aim of Female Education?” Godey’s Lady’s Book, vol. 47, (Sept. 1853), 274. 18. “Female Education. Tendencies of the Principles Embraced, and the System Adopted in the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary,” (June 1839), 15. Mary Lyon Papers, Mount Holyoke College [MHC].

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19. Lutz, ch. IX. 20. Emma Willard, “Address to the Pupils of the Washington Female Seminary.” (Pittsburgh, 1844), 14. TFS. 21. Amos Eaton to Dr. and Mrs. [Emma] Willard. Troy, November 20, 1819. Emma Willard Correspondence Collection, Emma Willard School [EWC]. 22. Amos Eaton to Mrs. [Emma] Willard. Troy, Dec. 24, 1824. EWC. 23. These textbooks were listed in catalogues alternately as “Mrs. Lincoln’s” or “Mrs. Phelps’.” Titles included Familiar Lectures (Botany), Geology, Natural Philosophy, and the Chemical Dictionary. 24. Joseph Emerson, “Prospectus of the Female Seminary, at Wethersfield, CT.: comprising a general prospectus, course of instruction, maxims of education, and regulations of the seminary: With notes, relating to books, branches of literature, methods of instructions, &c. &c.” (Wethersfield, CT.: 1826) American Antiquarian Society AAS. 25. Gwendolen B. Willis, Olympia Brown: An Autobiography (Racine, Wis.: 1960), 11. Olympia Brown Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University [SL]. 26. Throughout this chapter, information on textbook assignment was garnered from the annual catalogues of Ipswich, Auburn, Geneva, Byfield, Charlestown, Harford, Mount Holyoke, and Troy Female Seminaries, as well as the Amherst, Philips, and Concord Academies, and Brown, Amherst, Bowdoin, Harvard and Yale Colleges. Private School Catalogue Collection, Gutman Library, Harvard University [GL]. These seminaries were among the better schools in their categories, and were all in the Northeast. They are important in a national discussion, though, because they trained large numbers of women who went on to establish seminaries throughout the country modeled on their alma maters. See Anne Firor Scott, “The Ever-Widening Circle: The Diffusion of Feminist Values from the Troy Female Seminary, 1822–1872,” History of Education Quarterly 19, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 3–25. 27. Of the seminaries surveyed, all eight offered algebra, seven offered arithmetic and geometry (Byfield as the exception). Only three offered Trigonometry (Auburn, Holyoke, and Troy). Two (Charleston and Troy) offered Bookkeeping. 28. Jeremiah Day, An Introduction to Algebra, Being the First Part of a Course of Mathematics, Adapted to the Method of Instruction in the American Colleges. 18 ed. (New Haven: Hezekiah Howe & Co., 1835), iii–iv. 29. Mary Lyon, notes from Joseph Emerson “Introductory Lecture at the Seminary,” May, 1821. Emerson Collection, MHC. 30. With the exception of Byfield, all of the seminaries under consideration offered both French and Latin. Only three (Geneva, Charlestown, and Hartford) offered Greek. German, Italian, Spanish, and Hebrew were also occasionally offered. The reasons for the reluctance of some seminaries to offer classics in part related to the paucity of female teachers trained in the classics, but there were clearly other factors at work, including the gender and class implications of classical education that gave it its high status. 31. Ibid., 10. 32. William Russel, “The Education of Females” at Abbot Female Academy, Andover, MA, 1843, 10. Education Collection, SSC.

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33. Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, “Ninth Annual Catalogue of the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, in South Hadley, Mass., 1845–46,” (Amherst 1846), Mount Holyoke College Catalogue Collection, MHC. Charlestown Female Seminary, “This seminary may now be classed among the venerable institutions of the land.“ (Boston: June 1857) AAS. 34. Charlestown Female Seminary, “Catalogue of the Officers, Teachers and Pupils of the Charlestown Female Seminary, for the Year Ending Aug., 1844, with the Course of Study and Remarks,” (Boston 1844). Female Academies Collection, SL 35. See, for example, Joseph Emerson, “Prospectus of the Female Seminary, at Wethersfield, CT.: comprising a general prospectus, course of instruction, maxims of education, and regulations of the seminary. With notes, relating to books, branches of literature, methods of instructions, &c. &c.” (Wethersfield, CT.: A. Francis, printer, 1826) AAS. 36. All eight seminaries offered history and geography courses, with an emphasis on American and ancient history. With the exception of Ipswich, all of the seminaries offered European history. Ecclesiastical history was covered at Ipswich, Byfield, Charleston, and Holyoke. Five offered general political classes (Ipswich, Geneva, Charlestown, Hartford, and Holyoke); Constitutional law was taught at Charlestown and Holyoke. Those students who studied political economy (at Auburn, Charlestown, Hartford, Holyoke, Brown, and Yale) all used Wayland’s text. 37. Emerson. 38. Samuel Whelpley, A Compend of History, from the Earliest Times; Comprehending a General View of the Present State of the World, with Respect to Civilization, Religion, and Government; and a Brief Dissertation on the Importance of Historical Knowledge. 10th ed. 2 vols. (Boston: Richardson and Lord, 1828). AAS. 39. William Channing Woodbridge and Emma Willard, A System of Universal Geography, on the Principles of Comparison and Classification. Second ed. (Hartford: Oliver D. Cooke & Co., 1827), xv. Historical Textbook Collection, GL [HTC]. 40. Emerson. Five of the seminaries offered general political classes (Ipswich, Geneva, Charlestown, Hartford, and Holyoke); Constitutional law was taught at Charlestown and Holyoke. Those students who studied political economy (at Auburn, Charlestown, Hartford, Holyoke, Brown, and Yale) all used Wayland’s text. 41. William Sullivan, Political Class Book; Intended to Instruct the Higher Classes in Schools in the Origin, Nature, and Use of Political Power. (Boston: Charles J. Hendee and G. W. Palmer and Co., 1838), viii. 42. I was unable to find student notes on the text, but it would be interesting to see if the blunt presentation of gender inequality fostered any sort of questioning of the status quo by students in female seminaries. Perhaps the answer to this musing can be found in the roster of first wave feminists who graduated from the Female Seminaries in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. 43. One series of these lectures was published as Almira Lincoln Phelps’ Lectures to Young Ladies, Comprising Outlines and Applications of the Different Branches of Female Education, (Boston: Carter, Hendee & Co., 1833).

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44. For more on seminary revivals, see Joseph Conforti, “Mary Lyon, the Founding of Mount Holyoke College, and the Cultural Revival of Jonathan Edwards.” Religion and American Culture 3, no. 1 (1993): 69–89, and Elizabeth Alden Green, Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke: Opening the Gates. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1979, ch. 5–7. 45. Almira H. Lincoln Phelps, Lectures to Young Ladies, Comprising Outlines and Applications of the Different Branches of Female Education (Boston: Carter, Hendee & Co., 1833), 25–26. Emphasis in original. 46. William Russel, “The Education of Females” at Abbot Female Academy, Andover, MA, 1843, 10. Education Collection, SSC, 13. 47. Emerson. 48. Ibid. 49. Samuel P. Newman, A Practical System of Rhetoric, or the Principles and Rules of Style, Inferred from Examples of Writing. Third ed., (Boston: William Hyde & Co., 1832), iii. 50. George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric. A New Edition. (Philadelphia: Mitchell, Ames, and White, 1818). 51. Hugh Blair, An Abridgement of Lectures on Rhetoric, by Hugh Blair, D. D. Carefully Revised and Corrected, by an Experienced Teacher. To Which are Added Appropriate Questions, (Concord: Hill and Moore, 1821). 52. Emerson. 53. Isaac Watts’ On the Mind was required by Mount Holyoke Seminary as a preparatory text before enrollment, which may suggest why colleges did not assign it. 54. Student Writings. Box 3, Folders 48–59. Bucknall Collection, SL. 55. Betsey Huntting’s School Work, Folder 49. SL. 56. R. G. Parker, Progressive Exercises in English Composition. Third ed. (London: John R. Priestley, 1834), 74–77. 57. “Intellectual Qualities as possessed by Man and Woman,” Student Writings. Box 3, Folders 48–59. Bucknall Collection, SL. 58. Although they generally married later than other American women, and were more likely to remain unmarried than those who did not have a seminary education, the majority of students did marry and have children. Allmendinger, 40. 59. It is worth noting that one of the major proponents of domestic economy was Catharine Beecher, also a major force behind the seminary movement. 60. Emma Willard, “Address to the Pupils of the Washington Female Seminary.” Pittsburgh, 1844. TFS, 4–5. 61. Ibid., 23. 62. “Female Education. Tendencies of the Principles Embraced, and the System Adopted in the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.” June, 1839. MLP, 10. See also Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 63. Rockwell, 12. 64. Scott, 699. 65. “Female Education. An Address.” Magazine Articles and Pamphlets (1845), 23. SSC.

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66. Joseph White, Esq., A. G. Johnson, Esq., F. Dwight, Esq., et al., quoted in “Catalogue of the Officers and Pupils, of the Troy Female Seminary, for the Academic Year, Commencing September 8, 1858, and Ending June 29, 1859, Together with the Conditions of Admittance, &c.” (Troy, NY, 1859) 21. TFS.

4 ✛

The Training an Orphan Requires: Education in Nineteenth-Century New York City Orphan Asylums Sarah Mulhall Adelman

F

rom their founding until the turn of the twentieth century, most orphan asylums educated their child inmates in internal “home” schools. Given the frequent headaches managers confronted in running these schools, and the absence in most cases of barriers to the children’s enrollment in public schools, managers’ retention of children within the institution represented a deliberate decision that the education they sought to provide could not be achieved in public schools. More fundamental than differences in curricula, asylums sought to provide a more all-encompassing education than that provided by day schools, carefully selecting children’s activities and contacts both within and outside the schoolroom with the twin goals of providing a basic level of training and—more essentially—shaping children’s characters. The education provided within asylums was intended to instruct poor children (predominantly from African American or immigrant families) to successfully occupy their place in the world, training them to become respectable, hard-working, god-fearing members of the working class, for their own and society’s benefit. This chapter is a case study of four orphan asylums in New York City between 1830 and 1890: the Colored Orphan Asylum (COA), the Leake and Watts Orphan Home (L&W), the Orphans Home & Asylum of the

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Protestant Episcopal Church in New York (PE), and the Hebrew Orphan Asylum (HOA). These institutions represent the broad spectrum of orphan asylums in major American cities during the period, run by different religious groups, for different racial populations, and for children from different familial situations. While New York could boast of a uniquely large number of orphan asylums during this period, its asylums were very similar to those that operated around the country.1 Like most children in asylums, children at COA, L&W, and PE received their entire education within the asylum. Only the managers of HOA sent children to public school, a break with the norm that reflected unique priorities within the American Jewish community. Antebellum charitable workers and reformers founded orphan asylums beginning in the 1820s and 1830s as part of the broader movement to establish institutions to care for and reform those in need: the poor, the insane, and the criminal, among others.2 In the years before the term “institutional” became tainted in social welfare policy, orphan asylums were self-consciously institutional. Most nineteenth-century orphan asylums contained more half-orphans (children with one living parent) than fullorphans, and children were almost always admitted by either a parent or another relative.3 Many of these children could have remained in their families’ homes with the provision of financial assistance. Asylum managers, however, were not seeking simply to alleviate children’s physical needs; rather, they sought to mold future generations by providing children with an alternate childhood in a controlled environment. Managers believed that an institutional childhood had the best likelihood of shaping poor children into moral, industrious, and self-disciplined adults—in effect, creating a working class with middle-class values. To managers, one of the strongest appeals of an institutional childhood was the capacity to isolate children and regulate their environment; isolation ensured that the lessons taught and influences exerted by the managers would not be undone by others. Thus, managers constructed institutions to restrict children’s contact with the world outside asylum walls—the children lived, ate, played, and went to school within the asylum, interacting only with asylum staff and other inmates. Even family members were restricted to short, supervised monthly visits.4 Fearful of the influence of public school children or teachers on these children’s vulnerable characters, managers retained the children at the asylum, where they could hand-select every person children came into contact with and remove anyone whose influence appeared to be risky. In fact, managers routinely fired teachers who failed to meet their character standards, dismissed or transferred children to other institutions for setting a bad example, and built fences “so high that there could be no possible contact with those outside” to prevent neighborhood children and asylum chil-

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dren from communicating.5 Managers perceived isolation and control as essential to a successful educational strategy. The institutional structure of asylums also allowed managers to design an educational program that extended beyond the classroom and school hours. The Leake & Watts trustees argued that they had “an opportunity for work presented to no ordinary public or Sunday School teacher.”6 Because children remained in the institution full-time for several years, managers had more time to shape the children and a broader range of interactions than those available to schoolteachers limited to books and a few hours of contact each weekday during a limited school year. Managers tailored every element of life in the asylum toward their educational goals. Like all educational systems, those created by managers of orphan asylums intended not only to convey information, but also to socialize children, molding their thoughts and actions.7 Managers constructed a system that integrated lessons of morality, self-discipline, and industry into academic instruction, as well as continued these lessons beyond classroom walls. Internal asylum schools were an integral part of this educational strategy. Managers established them soon after asylums opened and doggedly continued them despite frequent difficulties. Schoolrooms occupied precious space within asylums that were constantly turning away needy children, soliciting for larger buildings, or otherwise bemoaning their limited facilities. The schools were also a source of frustration for managers, who struggled to retain quality teachers, control disciplinary problems, and make academic decisions. By the early 1870s, frequent teacher turnover left PE managers so jaded that they feared “that the only hope left them is that a mechanical contrivance for teaching may be invented free from the ordinary human frailties.”8 These managers grew so frustrated that they threatened to give up the venture entirely, close the asylum school and enroll the children in public school.9 However, the perceived benefits of complete control over the children’s surroundings, influences, and education outweighed mangers’ personal frustrations, and internal asylum schools remained the norm. The middle-class white managers of these asylums had minimal educational goals for asylum children: basic literacy and arithmetic skills, a foundation of religious knowledge, and elementary manual training. COA managers, for example, explained to supporters that the children’s education was necessarily “limited,” but that it “well qualifies them for any ordinary situation they may fill.”10 They prepared children to enter the adult workforce as members of the working class, but hoped they would do so with character traits the middle class idealized. In their efforts to mold children into moral, industrious adults, managers constructed an educational system that focused on imparting basic academic and

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vocational skills and—more importantly in their assessment—instilled a sense of discipline and carefully shaped children’s developing characters. In constructing the system of academic instruction within the asylum— as in every other element of the childhoods they constructed—managers aimed to prepare children for working-class adult lives that would meet middle-class standards of industry and morality. Asylum children often encountered academic instruction inferior to that available in contemporary public schools, with academic progress sacrificed for lessons of social discipline. However, this education was still above the norm for nineteenth-century working-class children, few of whom attended school as regularly—daily until the age of twelve or fourteen—as they did in asylums. Both COA and L&W referred to the education they provided as a “plain English” style and PE described its curriculum as “the usual elementary branches of a sound English education.”11 While managers did not record a complete curriculum, students were frequently examined in reading, spelling, definitions, arithmetic, geography, and writing, and occasionally in history, grammar, and astronomy.12 In practice, not all children studied all subjects, but each institution required children to master basic reading, writing, and arithmetic before they could be indentured.13 Managers argued that it was essential for the children to receive a basic education, but stressed that they were not giving inmates more education than necessary for their place in life. COA managers stated bluntly that “an elementary education is all that is attempted; if the children can be thoroughly drilled in the rudiments of learning, it is quite as much as can be expected.”14 For most children, advancement beyond the basics was limited by their return to relatives or indenture between the ages of twelve and fourteen. Although indenture contracts promised children a specified number of months in school and religious instruction, most of their time was devoted to labor. Occasionally managers helped a particularly ambitious and intelligent child continue schooling in place of indenture, but except at HOA these cases were rare.15 In one case, L&W managers sent three boys to public school to prepare them to be monitors or tutors in the asylum, admitting that the local public schools offered more advanced training than that available in the asylum.16 The limited academic instruction within asylums corresponded with managers’ expectations for the children’s future, expectations that were even more constrained for African American children, who were indentured at younger ages, after minimal schooling, and on increased servile terms.17 Because asylum children were trained for the places managers assumed they would occupy later in life, the level of academic instruction they received was basic and geared toward practical applications.

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In constructing and operating asylum schools, managers attempted to stay engaged with educational trends, but because they stubbornly adhered to the asylum school framework, they never implemented the more ambitious standards advocated by nineteenth-century education reformers. Managers did occasionally experiment with the latest educational methods, such as in 1847, when COA replaced the monitorial system that had previously been popular in the United States with the direct teacher instruction favored by reformers.18 However, although COA managers emphasized this advancement, in fact most asylum schools continued to rely on recitations and monitors.19 COA managers showed their familiarity with other trends in education by temporarily turning to object lessons— an increasingly popular pedagogical method involving tangible objects rather than written descriptions—when they had no slates or books after the asylum was destroyed in the 1863 draft riots.20 Despite this awareness, however, asylums’ large, multi-age, mixed-ability classrooms and strict isolation were counter to many of school reformers’ central tenets. As opposed to the age gradation championed by nineteenth-century school reformers, classes in asylum schools were strictly segregated by sex and only roughly divided into classes of “little girls” or “older boys.”21 With only two to four teachers in an asylum, strict age gradation and academic progression through classes was impractical. While managers were generally aware of trends in education reform, they were only willing to consider methods that were feasible within the asylum system. This resistance to fundamental change meant that, with only minor variations in practice, the educational framework managers created in the antebellum decades remained dominant until the turn of the century. Asylum managers believed that all instruction in the classroom should shape children’s characters while imparting knowledge and skills. Even instruction in “Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic” was instruction in the self-discipline and orderly deportment deemed necessary to becoming self-regulating, hardworking adults. COA managers asserted that, in addition to reading and writing, children would learn “the sound principles and practical industrious habits” which would “fit them faithfully to fulfil [sic] their duties as apprentices or servents [sic], and make them a blessing instead of a burden to society.”22 Academic instruction was to teach these “sound principles” and “industrious habits” by instilling order, selfdiscipline, an ability to apply oneself to a task, and a love of learning. Managers hoped to instill in the children the strong characters necessary for a life of labor and the ability to resist the temptations of working-class life.23 For this reason, asylum schools emphasized discipline above all else. Managers rarely debated curriculum or pedagogical methods, but they discussed order in the schools (or lack thereof) at great length. Their assessments of the progress or conditions of the schools centered on

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discipline rather than academic achievement, and teachers and other officers were dismissed for inability to keep order.24 As historians have noted, intellectual achievement was interpreted for much of the nineteenth century more as successful application of will than a sign of innate ability, which meant that the most important thing a teacher could do was to train students to dedicate themselves to their work.25 Managers believed such lessons of dedication and self-discipline were essential training in themselves, as well as a means to academic achievement. Managers also stressed order in the classroom because it represented proper respect for authority in the person of the teacher. PE managers objected to frequent teacher turnover because the children began to “think they have the teacher in their power” and complained to the matron in hopes of having a teacher fired. Such insubordination, as well as that represented in daily classroom rebellions, was viewed as absolutely unacceptable.26 Asylum children were trained to respect and defer both to their elders and to their betters, and teachers were the first line of adults through whom such lessons could be imparted and their success judged. Teachers were also held to high standards of morality and behavior because they were expected to guide the children’s character development within and outside the schoolroom, in addition to teaching the basic academic subjects and maintaining order.27 Teachers lived at the asylum and assisted in other elements of childcare and training outside of school hours.28 Many asylums placed great emphasis on the religious identification of potential teachers, in addition to the morality and respectability of their actions.29 In 1847 L&W trustees dismissed a teacher after receiving a letter from four boys in the asylum complaining that their teacher “Goes Out a great deal at night[,] is gone sometimes all night and when we want him to show us he is not here[.] he wont let us see the answers in the Key and we don’t know whether we have done them right or not and we don’t think he knows . . . and he sometimes appears to be sleeping in school after he has been out all night[.]”30 These were persuasive arguments because such behavior was unacceptable for the person entrusted with guiding malleable children onto the proper path of morality and industry. Nonacademic training was also incorporated into the school curriculum to target children’s character, an area in which managers agreed with public school reformers. This included musical instruction, and later in the period calisthenics, military drill, and drawing.31 Asylums frequently hired a singing instructor and bought organs, pianos, and melodeons for the schoolrooms to assist in these efforts.32 Children were called on to perform for visitors, special occasions, and exhibitions.33 Additionally, the HOA superintendent argued that singing should be included as a formal “subject of instruction” in the asylum as a method of character elevation.

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According to him, singing “is highly essential to the better culture of the mind of the pupils and contributes greatly to the refinement of their sense and to ennoble their heart and soul.”34 Singing and other physical activity was intended to supplement the goals of the more academic elements of asylum education—instilling self-discipline and promoting moral character development. All of the institutions placed great emphasis on both formal and informal religious instruction. For some asylums this religious training was doctrinal, but for all, the goal was to instill in children the lessons to lead a moral life on earth and be prepared for the hereafter. The HOA managers explicitly made this connection between religious formation and lived actions, arguing that “No labor nor effort is spared to give the children such religious and moral training as will powerfully influence them to become good Israelites, and, as a natural consequence, good and useful citizens.”35 Managers hoped these lessons about religious practice and moral behavior would be the cornerstone of “proper” working-class adult lives. Religious instruction was not left to Sunday school, but rather integrated into all elements of asylum life, both within and outside the classroom. Religious instruction occurred in the schoolrooms as a mandatory part of the children’s education, either during school hours, after class, or on the Sabbath. The specific nature of instruction varied by institution. Children in Protestant institutions generally prepared Scripture lessons, those in denominational institutions like PE additionally learned the catechism, and those at HOA received instruction in biblical lessons and Hebrew. Children being prepared to receive sacraments were often given separate or additional religious instruction.36 Outside of the classroom, in most asylums children gathered daily for morning and/or evening prayers, said or heard a blessing before meals, said prayers or sang hymns before bed, and were given religious lectures when disciplined.37 Morning and evening prayers consisted of reading from a prayer book, reciting memorized prayers, and singing, occasionally with additional religious commentary by an asylum officer.38 In theory these replicated the daily family prayers conducted in individual households, thus impressing this as an ideal upon children unlikely to have grown up with such experiences.39 Managers also frequently stocked asylum libraries with religious publications and stories on religious or moral topics.40 Continuous religious instruction was such a high priority that managers routinely hired superintendents with religious credentials.41 After resigning from his position as L&W superintendent, Rev. James Demarest pushed for a bonus on the grounds that he had effectively also served as “Chaplain of the House.”42 Demarest did not receive the hoped-for bonus, because the managers considered religious instruction and leadership an integral element of the superintendent’s duties.43

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Asylums incorporated religious practices throughout the week, but the Sabbath was set aside in particular as a day of rest, reflection, and religious activity. Children attended religious services—sometimes at local churches, but more frequently within the asylum—and were expected to show the day proper respect. Asylum rules required a reverent atmosphere, and permitted children to participate only in activities deemed appropriate for the Sabbath.44 At L&W, children were required to turn in all library books by Saturday evening and they could not check out new books until Monday morning, to ensure that they were not tempted to read nonreligious texts on the Sabbath. Although many of the library books had religious messages and all were approved by the managers, reading on the Sabbath was confined to the Bible and the religious papers for children to which the asylum subscribed.45 Through these efforts managers created a more intense religious training than that possible with either public education or Sabbath school. Training children in religious habits and practices was, they affirmed, as important a component of religious education as lessons in Hebrew or the catechism. Religious transformation, rather than academic advancement, most frequently headlined managers’ reports to the public. Annual reports were asylums’ primary mode of presenting themselves to the public, and managers used these venues as an opportunity to illustrate their success and solicit future donations. In selecting their most inspiring accounts of success, managers outlined children’s religious actions in great detail. For example, the only year COA managers published excerpts from the matron’s daily record book was the year a religious spirit swept through the asylum, prompting children to hold prayer meetings on their own initiative.46 In addition, managers, particularly those at COA, often related children’s deaths as sentimentalized manifestations of religious conversion.47 Visitors to the institutions confirmed managers’ assessment that religious devotion was a suitable criterion on which to judge the success of the asylum. For example, when George Tuthill and Emily Hall visited L&W in 1847, they noted that they were “Glad to hear that the converting influences of the Holy Ghost are sometimes here. Amen.”48 Evidence of religious conversion was taken by the managers as a sign of success in their educational mission, and presented to the public at large as such. It was the most tangible way they could point to success in their goal to instill solid moral character in the children of the working class.

“SOME ACTIVE EMPLOYMENT SHOULD BE PROVIDED FOR THEM” Managers’ educational strategy targeted children’s bodies as well as their minds and souls. They asserted that the lessons asylums taught needed to

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be reinforced with physical training and applications. Therefore, managers considered training in manual labor to be an essential part of asylum children’s educational experience. This training was intended both to teach necessary vocational skills and instill a sense of responsibility and love of labor in the children. Most asylums assigned children chores to assist in the daily upkeep of the institution. These chores generally consisted of cleaning the asylum, feeding animals (if the asylum kept livestock), shoveling snow, setting the table, assisting with laundry, and other basic domestic tasks.49 In addition to other chores, all children (generally including the boys) were taught to sew and made items for the institution’s use.50 In addition, older girls often received supplemental sewing instruction, and sometimes were required to spend hours outside of the classroom at this work.51 Managers insisted in their internal records that, while the asylum benefited from such work, it was done for the good of the children. PE managers noted that girls were assigned to the charge of the seamstress “to assist her [and] to learn the art of mending.”52 The boys, for their part, learned to mend shoes. Most of the references to asylum shoemakers list their primary job as instructing boys “in his trade” or “to teach the boys to mend [and] make shoes,” with their own labor mending shoes for the asylum described as a secondary purpose.53 While children’s labor saved asylums money, managers believed that light domestic work taught children skills they would need throughout life. A member of the PE School Committee, for example, referred to sewing and household labor as “very important branches of education.”54 In 1867 COA began removing advanced children from school for the six months prior to their eligibility for indenture to provide intensive training in household labor, personal cleanliness, and moral instruction, to prepare them for their indentures.55 Although this program was one of particularly intensive training at the end of children’s stay at the asylum, the educational underpinnings of it also guided managers’ decisions to employ the children in household work throughout their childhoods. Managers also assumed work would impart a joy of labor in and of itself, inspiring children to become hard-working adults. Antebellum reformers feared that charity sapped the desire to work and that the poor were becoming increasingly lazy.56 Therefore, they sought to instill a work ethic in the children of the poor. In describing children’s labor within the asylum, COA managers noted that this was so minimal as to provide very little aid to the institution but was beneficial because “habits of industry are, however, acquired, which may be of permanent advantage.”57 Because they believed labor taught discipline, managers also turned to it as the panacea for children with disciplinary problems. In a case where older boys were disrupting school regularly, the PE School Committee suggested that part of the solution was “that some active employment should

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be provided for them” (emphasis original).58 HOA president Benjamin Hart, an advocate of indenturing boys into farming, proposed preparing a plot of land as a vegetable garden “not for the intrinsic value of the productions, but for the cultivation of healthful exercise, and pleasurable enjoyment of the children, and to draw their attention to agricultural or horticultural pursuits.”59 In addition, managers hoped that exposing the children to manual labor—the type of work they were destined for in the assessment of the managers—would teach them to love this work. One visitor to L&W echoed these sentiments when he suggested that the asylum create a mechanical workshop for the boys’ use because such training and activities “would greatly promote the beneficent objects of the Institution by developing and directing their natural tastes to such pursuits as are most consonant with their natural endowments.”60 Exposure to manual labor, therefore, was intended not only to provide the children with the knowledge to perform these tasks as adults, but, more fundamentally, to instill in them the desire to work in these jobs. These same intertwined goals of education and character formation led some asylums, particularly later in the period, to establish more formal processes of industrial education. Unable to procure acceptable indentures with Jewish masters, HOA managers founded an industrial school to provide intensive training in manual trades.61 Managers repeatedly argued that this school provided an education for the children rather than labor or profit for the institution, and for at least some boys, it did train them for their future careers.62 HOA had the most organized program in industrial education, but by the late nineteenth century most other asylums began transforming the ad hoc training they offered into formal classes. PE managers agreed to sponsor “kitchen garden” classes, taught by an outside teacher, beginning in 1880, sent some boys to carpentry lessons beginning in 1887, and instituted cooking classes in 1888.63 In 1892 L&W managers added training in carpentry and the general “use of tools,” rowing training to prepare boys for the navy, and created a sewing class with a specialized teacher.64 Three years later they added a class in telegraphy.65 The rise of these training programs corresponds with the rise of industrial schools more broadly in many major American cities, including New York, in the 1870s and 1880s.66 While according to managers’ ideals children’s labor served educational purposes—done only in the quantity necessary to learn basic skills and the joy of labor—in practice asylums frequently turned to children to provide necessary extra labor to replace the loss of an employee or at particularly busy times of year. The L&W annual large-scale spring and fall cleaning was accomplished until 1860 by removing 15 to 20 children from school for 5 to 6 weeks.67 At PE, the asylum’s inability to retain laundresses led the matron to enlist girls to do the task. The manager who visited the

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institution in February 1862 noted that the children working in the laundry were “too much fatigued from washing all day” and detailed that the same girls “had washed all day Monday, part of Tuesday, of Wednesday, Thursday, and were expected to do the same all Friday, and Saturday.” To resolve this problem, the managers ordered the washing machine to be repaired and a laundress to be hired. Within two weeks, however, the new laundress had quit and the girls were back to work. This pattern continued; a year later the managers again noted that “the same children were engaged every day and all day washing and ironing.”68 Managers and officers of asylums frequently clashed over these issues. Superintendents and matrons were most concerned about meeting the daily operational needs of the institution, while managers asserted the educational purpose of labor. Managers frequently feared that too much time spent in domestic labor detracted from other areas of children’s education, namely academic instruction. The PE School Committee managers were “very much surprised” when their examinations of the students in March 1870 revealed that the older girls lagged behind both the boys and the younger girls. This discrepancy was “accounted for by the fact that a large portion of the time of the elder girls is taken up in domestic service.”69 Though they intended to train children for a life of manual labor, managers believed that during their childhood years manual labor was but one component of a broader training regime. In the end, managers and officers generally compromised, allowing children to work during school hours when necessary, but implementing measures to safeguard other elements of their education. As COA managers explained, although they disliked the employment of children during school hours “this must be done when necessary.”70 In each asylum, however, managers sought to preserve children’s academic progress despite this excess labor through such measures as rotating the children taken out of school or assigning work to the most advanced students who could “best afford to lose the time from study.”71 Managers were willing to concede their goal of labor only as educational, but would not sacrifice other elements of the children’s education to officers’ pleas for the children’s labor. They saw manual labor as one component of an all-encompassing educational strategy to turn the children of the poor into working-class laborers with the values the middle-class idealized—particularly hard work, morality, and self-discipline.

THE PATH LESS TRAVELED The educational policies of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum differed in several important ways from those of other asylums, and their exceptionalism

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brings the decisions and goals of other asylums into sharper relief. Like other asylums, HOA sought to exert control over the lives of children in its care and viewed instilling character into its charges among its highest priorities. However, unlike most other orphan asylums in the nineteenth century, it did not seek to entirely isolate children, nor did it assume these children were necessarily destined to remain in the class into which they were born. HOA managers’ decisions both to integrate asylum children into the larger community through attendance at public school and their work to extend to children educational opportunities beyond the most basic skills illustrate the options available to other asylums if they had chosen to capitalize on them; HOA’s experience proves the viability of an alternate path in educating asylum children, one that most asylums intentionally shunned. HOA was unique among the case study asylums for sending its children to the local public schools, and did so in a deliberate attempt to expose its children to a common school education and neighborhood children.72 Managers debated the merits of creating an internal asylum school in 1864 in response to a proposal by the HOA superintendent. However, led by Benjamin Hart, HOA’s president, the managers vigorously defeated the proposal. Hart proclaimed at the annual meeting that the common school system “is a great blessing to the public at large” and “the earlier our children mingle with those of their own age who belong with them to a common country and who in after life are to be their fellow citizens, the better.” One of the great benefits that public schools offered, according to Hart, was precisely the exposure to and common experience with other children feared by most asylum managers. This view was directly related to the position of Jews in nineteenthcentury American society. Hart continued, “in our homes and houses of worship we should be Hebrews, in all other conditions of life let us claim the proud title of Americans from which we may expect whatever advantage may belong to our character as such.”73 Likely in efforts to counter anti-Semitism, HOA managers explicitly rejected the isolationism of other asylums and emphasized citizenship, arguing that learning to be Americans and to interact with other American children was a key element to asylum children’s education. The more advanced tracks available in the public schools also complemented the unbounded academic and career potential HOA managers uniquely encouraged in their children. While the child who continued his or her education and went to college was the rare exception at other asylums, this was an accepted track at HOA. HOA inmates were funneled onto paths based on academic achievement, aptitudes, and desires. The superintendent, principal of the school, and board of managers conferred and decided on the appropriate path for each individual child, in conjunc-

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tion with the child or his or her relatives. Managers generally opted to keep a child in school as long as he or she was making sufficient progress. This extended through high school and even into college, normal college, or theological training.74 Some historians have argued that education was particularly valued within the American Jewish community, and this community may have also held fewer preconceptions about the limited potential of poor children.75 Even children who did not show great academic potential were retained in the asylum’s industrial school rather than indentured, because HOA managers were more insistent than those at any other asylum that children only be indentured for genuine training, for which there was a shortage of placements, and not as cheap labor.76 In supplementing rather than replacing a public school education and encouraging its children to maximize an unbounded potential, the Hebrew Orphan Asylum was atypical among nineteenth-century orphan asylums. While all asylums agreed on the need to provide children with basic academic and vocational knowledge and skills, a religious foundation, and the training to build self-discipline and strong characters, most did so with the goal of training children for a future as manual laborers or domestic servants. Their assumption of the future paths of poor and racially and ethnically “other” children led them to focus their educational programs on the basics of the three Rs, religious instruction, training in sewing and menial work, and—above all—developing the moral fortitude and strength of character to resist the temptations of working-class New York City.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER 1) What was taught in schools within orphan asylums? How were asylum schools similar to and different from public schools?

2) Using the document provided, describe asylum administrators’ priorities in the system of education they created and managed within asylums. What is the connection between these priorities and goals and expectations for poor children?

3) What social, political, and economic factors played a role in creating orphan asylums in the nineteenth century? How does the treatment of orphans and poor children differ today?

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4) What is the relationship between the underlying principles taught in orphan asylum schools and the norms held by larger nineteenth-century American culture? Compare and contrast schools for orphans or poor children in other countries or time periods to the ones described by Adelman.

h IN THEIR WORDS: EDUCATION IN THE ORPHANS HOME AND ASYLUM Orphanages, sometimes referred to as asylums, had to decide whether to educate children themselves or send them to public schools. Here is one account of the former. Excerpts from Minutes of the School Committee, 1863–1875, The Orphans Home & Asylum of the Protestant Episcopal Church in New York, Manuscript Collection, New York Historical Society, New York City. Report for March [1870]: At the last monthly meeting the Committee decided to have an examination of the children in their studies every 3 months_ The first was held on Wednesday the 23d + Tuesday the 29th of the present month. The Committee were exceedingly gratified at the order + discipline wh[ich] prevailed in every department, as well as at the manner in which both the boys + girls recited their lessons_ They were however very much surprised to find that the recitations were more generally good with the boys than with the girls_ This is accounted for by the fact that a large portion of the time of the elder girls is taken up in domestic service_ They were even much behind the younger girls[.] The Committee are thoroughly aware of the necessity of their being trained in these very important duties_ at the same time they feel that by a careful division of their time they might have the opportunity to lay the foundation of a plain education _ As an instance of the defective education of the girl[s] Anna Diddy has been returned to the House + upon examination found utterly deficient. She cd [could] not read so well as the smallest girl in Miss Kennell’s department + was unable to answer the simplest question_ This may arise in a measure from her wilfulness [sic] but if more time had been given to her lessons a better result might have been obtained.

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To much praise cannot be given to the teachers for the grt [great] improvement in the children + the Committee are persuaded that if they (the teachers) are sustained in their present course by the managers that the children will continue to advance both in education + conduct __This is the more desirable as it is impossible to foresee what capabilities may not be developed by good training + for what degree [of] usefulness any one of these children may not thereby be fitted_ Sarah Graham + Lizzy Peterson have decided to behave themselves so that the Committee are relieved from the necessity of carrying out the intended punishment[.] Sewing done in Miss Kennell’s room _ 16 sheets, 5 doz[en] pocket handkerchiefs hemmed + marked _ In Miss Gray’s room _ 48 handkerchiefs hemmed__ *** Report for October [1870]: The School Committee are happy to notice great improvement in the Male Department both in conduct and lessons since the last report[.] Miss Van Sciver[?] has succeeded by much judicious effort in establishing order. Miss V.S. says their unruly conduct was rather the consequence of the confusion incident to frequent changes of teachers and the relaxation of order and discipline which inevitably result therefrom, rather than to persistent evil intentions on the part of the boys. Miss Morrow has charge of the larger girls and Miss Gray has returned to her own department[.] The schools are now orderly and having been furnished with new books, slates &c. are pursuing their studies to great advantage. Some of Miss Gray’s little girls have made great improvement in sewing and several little boys have learned to sew very well. 6 ladies have taught [religious education or Catechism] on Friday in the Female and 8 in the Male Department. 48 Hdkfs. [handkerchiefs] hemmed. October 31st 1870 P.S.: Good Behaviour tickets have been introduced apparently with good effect. *** Report for November [1870]: The Committee are gratified to be able to report a continuance of the improved deportment of the boys and a rather favorable condition of the

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other departments of the School_ Miss Gray finding herself unequal to the duties of her situation presented her resignation, which was accepted. 13 Ladies have taught on Fridays. 3 Doz. Hdkfs. Hemmed and some fancywork done[.] *** Report for November [1871]: The Committee have to report that for the first time in many months the school has its full compliment [sic] of teachers[.] It is hoped that the present corps will be retained as the children are utterly without the discipline so essential to their future well being + so necessary to progress in their studies_ *** Report for December [1871]: The Committee are happy to report a continuation of the good prospects of last month_ The teachers remain + seem satisfied + the children are getting under control_ *** Report for January [1872]: The Committee regret that the good prospects of last month have not continued _ The girls’ rooms are again without teachers + unless some permanent arrangement can be made for carrying on the schools the Committee fear that they must be given up_ *** Report for February [1872]: The Committee are happy to report a grt [great] improvement upon the gloomy announcement of last month when the teachers in the girls’ rooms had resigned leaving only one teacher on duty_ The places of the two former have been supplied by two very efficient women who feel themselves quite competent to control the children + bring about a thorough reformation in the conduct of the schools[.] . . . There is but one trouble that men-

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aces the stability of the present situation, namely the dining room duty_ The teachers feel that coming from the duties of the school room +going at once to the dining room is a grt [great] strain upon their health_ This is the case especially with Mrs Dean a most valuable woman[.] Shd [Should] she feel compelled to resign on this account the Committee will feel too much discouraged to remain in their present position.

h NOTES 1. For a discussion of education in orphan asylums based on the published reports of asylums around the country, see Timothy A. Hacsi, Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 173–195. Interestingly, Hacsi comes to many similar conclusions about the centrality of character formation to asylums’ educational endeavors. An examination of asylums’ internal records, however, reveals some differences between practice within asylums and the published depictions Hacsi focuses on. While published reports emphasize religion as the primary focus of education, internal records reveal a much heavier emphasis in practice on discipline and class-based fears and goals. Another important dynamic not visible in published reports was divisions between managers (who set policies) and officers (who were entrusted with implementing those policies and keeping the asylum functioning smoothly and on budget) and the divergences these divisions caused between theory and practice. 2. David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1971); LeRoy Ashby, Endangered Children: Dependency, Neglect, and Abuse in American History (New York: Twayne, 1997). 3. Admission Records, Records of the Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans, New York Historical Society, New York City (hereafter cited as COA MSS); Admissions Books, Leake & Watts Collection, New York Historical Society, New York City (hereafter cited as L&W MSS); Applications Book and Admissions/ Discharges, 1851–1865, The Orphans Home & Asylum of the Protestant Episcopal Church in New York, Leake & Watts Collection, New York Historical Society, New York City (hereafter cited as PE MSS); Applications for Admission, Hebrew Orphan Asylum of the City of New York, Records, American Jewish Historical Society, Newton Centre, Mass. and New York City (hereafter cited as HOA MSS). Other historians have noted this as well. For example, see Hacsi, Second Home, 113–117; Nurith Zmora, Orphanages Reconsidered: Childcare Institutions in Progressive Era Baltimore (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). 4. HOA 1867 rules, in Annual Report of the Hebrew Benevolent and Orphan Asylum Society, of the City of New York, for the year ending April, 1868 (New York: M. Thalmessinger, 1868), HOA MSS (hereafter cited as HOA Annual Report, 1868); Board of Trustees Minutes, 4 Sept 1865, PE MSS (hereafter cited as PE Trustees);

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House Committee Minutes, 14 Jun 1894, L&W MSS (hereafter cited as L&W House Committee); Minutes of Board Meetings, 11 May 1838, COA MSS (hereafter cited as COA Board). 5. COA Board, 10 Apr 1840, 11 Nov 1870, 2 Aug 1878; PE Trustees, 18 May 1866, 6 Mar 1876; Board of Governors Minutes, 8 May 1872, HOA MSS (hereafter cited as HOA Board of Governors); L&W House Committee, 29 Apr 1846; Minutes of the Executive Committee, 11 May 1866, 27 Nov 1874, PE MSS (hereafter cited as PE Executive Committee). 6. Minutes of the Trustees, 16 Nov 1893, L&W MSS (hereafter cited as L&W Trustees). 7. For a discussion of socialization in American public schools, and the class and ethnic dimensions thereof, see the work of Carl Kaestle: Carl F. Kaestle, “Social Change, Discipline, and the Common School in Early Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 9, no.1 (1978), 1–17; Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). 8. Minutes of the School Committee, Mar 1873, PE MSS (hereafter cited as PE School). 9. PE School, Jan 1872. 10. Twenty-Ninth Annual Report of the Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans (New York: John F. Trow, 1866). 11. PE Constitution, in PE Trustees, 12 Dec 1851; House Rules, in L&W Trustees, 23 Oct 1843; Twenty-Eighth Annual Report of the Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans (New York: John F. Trow, 1865). 12. PE Trustees, 1 Apr 1878–3 Mar 1879; Visitors Book, 23 Sept 1844, 12 Feb 1845, 27 Dec 1853, L&W MSS, (hereafter cited as L&W Visitors Book); COA Board, 5 May 1840, 11 Apr 1856. 13. COA by-laws, in COA Board, 17 Mar 1837; PE by-laws, in PE Trustees, 12 Dec 1851; HOA Board of Governors, 2 Nov 1873; L&W House Committee, 28 Mar 1848. 14. Thirty-Fourth Annual Report for the Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans (New York: New York Printing Co., 1870). 15. At HOA this was a relatively routine process, but only a few examples appear in the records of the other asylums: PE Executive Committee, 23 Jun 1865; PE Trustees, 6 Oct 1857, 1 May 1865; COA Board, 14 Nov 1856, Oct 1866. 16. L&W House Committee, 27 Jan 1847, 31 Mar 1847. 17. COA Admissions and Discharge Records, COA MSS. 18. COA Board, 12 Feb 1847, 12 Mar 1847, 9 Jul 1847. The shift away from Lancasterian models of education began in the late 1820s, with most major urban public school systems abandoning it by the end of the 1840s. New York City was the last major city to change methods, not doing so until 1853. Dell Upton, “Lancasterian Schools, Republican Citizenship, and the Spatial Imagination in Early Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 55, no. 3 (1996), 238–253: 251. 19. PE School, Mar 1870, Jul 1871; COA Board, 11 May 1838; PE Trustees, 4 Nov 1861, 7 Oct 1872; L&W Visitors Book, 23 Sept 1844, 12 Feb 1845, 27 Dec 1853; L&W

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House Committee, 28 Jan 1846; Kennedy to House Committee, 17 Apr 1854, Correspondence file, L&W MSS (hereafter cited as L&W Correspondence). 20. Transcription of annual report in COA Board, 12 Dec 1863. There is also scattered evidence that object lessons may have been employed in later years as well, as at least one among an array of educational methods. Thirtieth Annual Report of the Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans (New York: John F. Trow, 1866) (hereafter cited as COA Annual Report, 1866). For a brief description of object lessons, see William J. Reese, America’s Public Schools: From the Common School to “No Child Left Behind” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 41, 87–95. Students seem to have more commonly used slates or copybooks. PE Trustees, 4 Nov 1861, 7 Feb 1876; PE School, Feb 1867, Oct 1870. 21. Reese, America’s Public Schools. PE School, Jun 1863; COA Board, 12 Jun 1839; McKenne to House Committee, 5 Jan 1849, L&W Correspondence. Sex segregation was true of every asylum, but a departure from the practice in public schools. Reese, America’s Public Schools, 14. 22. Second annual report, in COA Board, 10 Dec 1838. 23. Public schools also initially placed “character formation and moral uplift” above intellectual achievement. Reese, America’s Public Schools, 13, 33–35; Joel Spring, The American School, 1642–1996 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997), 66, 126. 24. PE School, Mar 1866, Nov 1871, Mar 1872; PE Trustees, 2 Dec 1889; COA Board, 16 Oct 1837, 9 Mar 1838. Discipline was also generally seen as the most important part of public school teachers’ task during the period. Paul Theobald, Call School: Rural Education in the Midwest to 1918 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995), 134. 25. Theobald, Call School, 137–8, Barbara Finklestein, Governing the Young: Teacher Behavior in Popular Primary Schools in Nineteenth-century United States (New York: Falmer Press, 1989), 95–7, 100–101, 107. 26. Visitor’s Book, 1860–1879, Apr 1861, PE MSS (hereafter cited as PE Visitor’s Book). 27. Public school teachers were also vulnerable to losing their jobs for improprieties in their private lives, but this may have been more marked in a religious institution such as the orphan asylum. The L&W superintendent fired an unmarried laundress who became pregnant. Hayden to Knox, 30 Jan 1892, L&W Correspondence. Theobald, Call School, 144; Spring, The American School, 126–127. 28. Third Annual Report of the Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans (New York, Mahlon Day, 1839); PE Visitor’s Book, Apr 1861. Labor outside classrooms was a frequent cause of conflict between teachers and managers, and likely was a contributing factor to the high rate of teacher turnover. PE School, Aug 1863, Jun 1870, Feb 1871, Feb 1872. 29. PE managers resolved only to hire teachers who were “Churchwomen,” that is, members of the Protestant Episcopal Church. PE Trustees, 1 Jun 1863. This was true as well with regard to other people employed in the institution. Carrie Martin to “Dear Sir,” 16 Nov 1892, L&W Correspondence. 30. [Asylum inmates] to “Squire Rossvelt” [James Roosevelt], March 1847, L&W Correspondence; L&W Trustees, 31 March 1847. The Trustees’ minutes record the teacher’s resignation, but given the timing the resignation was likely involuntary.

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31. HOA added military drill much earlier than any of the other asylums. Annual Report of the Hebrew Benevolent Society and Orphan Asylum of the City of New York, For the Year ending April, 1865, HOA MSS (New York: John Medole, 1865) (hereafter cited as HOA Annual Report, 1865). The first reference to military drill in PE records refers specifically to the precedent at HOA. PE Trustees, 6 May 1889. The addition of drawing and calisthenics later in the period mirrors the introduction of these subjects in many public school systems in the late nineteenth century. Reese, America’s Public Schools, 110. 32. For a few examples, see, PE Executive Committee 18 Mar 1864, 26 Jan 1877; HOA Board of Governors, 4 Mar 1877; L&W House Committee, 25 Feb 1846; L&W Trustees, 30 Jun 1868. Singing was also common in contemporary public schools and Reese argues that this was another forum for teaching the children perseverance and punctuality. Reese, America’s Public Schools, 39. 33. PE Trustees, 6 Apr 1885; PE Executive Committee, 23 Jun 1865. 34. Superintendent’s report, in Board of Trustees Minutes, 19 Jan 1873, HOA MSS (hereafter cited as HOA Board of Trustees). However, at another point the HOA managers justified musical instruction on the grounds that it was practical vocational instruction. HOA Annual Report, 1865, 5. 35. HOA Annual Report, 1868, 1–2. 36. COA Board, 11 Apr 1851, 9 Mar 1855; PE Executive Committee, 5 Jun 1885; PE School, Nov 1869, Dec 1870; PE Trustees, 7 Feb 1887, 4 Apr 1887; Forty-Sixth Annual Report of the Hebrew Benevolent & Orphan Asylum Society, of the City of New York (New York: D. Wolff, 1869), HOA MSS (hereafter cited as HOA Annual Report, 1869). 37. HOA rules, in HOA Annual Report, 1868; HOA Annual Report, 1869; PE Trustees, 4 Nov 1861, 3 May 1886, 7 Mar 1887, 4 Apr 1887; Guest to House Committee, 23 Feb 1860, L&W Correspondence; COA Board, 11 Jan 1867; L&W Punishment book, 1843–1853, L&W MSS. 38. PE Trustees, 4 Apr 1887; McKeene to Roosevelt, 11 Jul 1848, L&W Correspondence; COA Board, 11 Jan 1867. 39. A. Gregory Schneider, The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 40. Kennedy to Knox, 1 Dec 1852. L&W Correspondence, L&W House Committee, 14 Feb 1844, 25 Nov 1850; COA Board, 14 Mar 1873, 14 Dec 1874. 41. This included at least three L&W superintendents: Rev. Richard M. Hayden, Rev. Samuel Ferguson, and Rev. James Demarest. Zmora has noted the employment of rabbis serving in this role at the Baltimore HOA. Zmora, Orphanages Reconsidered. 42. Demarest to House Committee, 19 Apr 1852, L&W Correspondence. 43. After receiving this letter, a vote to give Demarest a $100 bonus was defeated due to a tie vote. L&W Trustees, 24 Mar 1852. 44. L&W Punishment book, 1843–1853, L&W MSS; PE Executive Committee, 14 Feb 1868, 13 Mar 1868, 18 Feb 1870, 14 May 1886; PE Trustees, 5 Dec 1870, 3 May 1886; HOA Annual Report, 1868, L&W House Committee, 1 May 1850, 22

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Nov 1852; Fourth annual report, in COA Board, 12 Dec 1840; COA Board, 12 Dec 1856. 45. Kennedy to Knox, 1 Dec 1852, L&W Correspondence. 46. Thirteenth Annual Report of the Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans (New York: J. F. Trow, 1850). 47. For example, ibid.; Twelfth Annual Report of the Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans (New York: Leavitt, Trow, & Co, 1848). 48. L&W Visitors Book, 8 May 1847. 49. PE School, Feb 1864; PE Executive Committee, 9 Nov 1888; HOA rules, in HOA Annual Report, 1868, COA Board, 10 Nov 1871, 9 Apr 1875; L&W Punishment book, 1843–1853, L&W MSS; PE Executive Committee, 1 Aug 1862, 25 Jan 1867; PE Visitor’s Book, Dec 1870; Guest to House Committee, 23 Feb 1860, L&W Correspondence. 50. PE School, Feb 1864, Mar 1870; COA Board, 12 Feb 1847, 9 Dec 1864; PE Trustees, 1 Jul 1864, 1 Apr 1878. 51. PE Trustees, 4 Nov 1861; COA Board, 12 Jun 1875. 52. PE Visitor’s Book, Oct 1870. Emphasis original. 53. PE Trustees, 3 Mar 1862, 6 Aug 1866; COA Board, 10 Nov 1854. 54. PE School, Jun 1871. 55. The children were to be chosen from the most advanced school in the asylum. Nine years later an almost identical program was proposed and implemented, suggesting that it had fallen into disuse in the interim. COA Board, 12 Apr 1867, 10 May 1867, 9 Apr 1869, 7 Jun 1878. 56. Carol Groneman Pernicone, “‘The Bloody Ould Sixth’: A Social Analysis of a New York City Working–Class Community in the Mid-Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss, University of Rochester, 1973); Joel Schwartz, Fighting Poverty with Virtue: Moral Reform and America’s Urban Poor, 1825–2000 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). 57. COA Annual Report, 1866. 58. PE School, Mar 1866. Emphasis original. 59. HOA Annual Report, 1865, 4. 60. L&W Visitors Book, 2 May 1854. 61. HOA Annual Report, 1869. 62. One boy left the industrial school for a job as a journeyman shoemaker. HOA Board of Trustees, 19 Nov 1871. 63. Kitchen garden classes included, among other things, laundry lessons using miniature garments. PE Executive Committee, 14 May 1880, PE Trustees, 4 Oct 1880. Nine boys were sent to carpentry lessons at the Industrial Education Association, paid for by one of the managers. PE Trustees, 7 Feb 1887. After eight years of sending some girls to an external cooking school, PE managers decided in 1888 to begin formal cooking lessons within the institution instead. PE Trustees, 3 Mar 1879, 2 Apr 1888. The first reference to “industrial classes” at COA was in 1898. COA Board, 12 Dec 1898. 64. L&W Trustees, 17 May 1892, 22 Nov 1892. 65. L&W Trustees, 19 Jun 1895.

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66. Reese, America’s Public Schools, 99–109, Spring, The American School, 198–199, 233–236; Gary Polster, Inside Looking Out: The Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum, 1868–1924 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1990), 37–39. 67. Guest to House Committee, 23 Feb 1860, L&W Correspondence. 68. PE Visitor’s Book, 11 Feb 1862, 14 Feb 1862, 25 Feb 1862, Mar 1862, Jan 1863. 69. PE School, Mar 1870. 70. COA Board, 14 Nov 1856. 71. R. M. Hayden to House Committee 1880–1886, 1888, L&W Correspondence; Guest to House Committee, 23 Feb 1860, 21 Feb 1865, L&W Correspondence; HOA 1867 rules, in HOA Annual Report 1868, 17; PE Trustees, 7 Dec 1891; PE School, Mar 1870; COA Board, 14 Nov 1856. 72. In general, public school attendance was much more common among Jewish childcare institutions than those of other religions. Reena Sigman Friedman, These Are Our Children: Jewish Orphanages in the United States, 1880–1925 (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1994), 52, 99. At points in its history HOA did create a school within the institution for some students. One of these was for a short period when one of the local public schools had become overcrowded and managers believed the children’s education to be compromised. However, the managers sought an opportunity to re-enroll the children in public school, and quickly did so when a nearby normal college opened a training school. Dissatisfaction with this school led to the eventual return of some children to a school within the asylum, while the other children remained in public schools until 1889, when a public school was formed within the asylum. Even this school, however, did not entail the complete isolation of the “home” schools of other asylums, since local children were admitted and the school was under the supervision of the New York City Board of Education. HOA Board of Trustees 28 May 1872, 19 Apr 1874, 21 Jun 1874; HOA Board of Governors, 6 Oct 1872, 3 May 1874, 23 Oct 1875; Friedman, These Are Our Children, 47, 100–101. 73. Annual Report of the Hebrew Benevolent Society and Orphan Asylum of the City of New York, for the year ending April 15th, 1864 (New York, S. Benedicks & Co., n.d.), 4, 12, HOA MSS. 74. For example, see, HOA Annual Report, 1868; HOA Board of Governors, 7 Jun 1874, 4 Jun 1876, 10 Dec 1876, 3 Oct 1875. 75. Zmora, Orphanages Reconsidered, 92, 110. Susan A. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 76. HOA Annual Report 1869, 25–26; HOA Board of Governors, 1 Jan 1871, 7 Jan 1872.

5 ✛

The Idea of Integration in the Age of Horace Mann Chris Beneke

T

he notion that the U.S. Civil Rights movement constituted a long revolution—that it began well before the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, and continued well beyond the Voting Rights Act of 1965—is now widely accepted among historians.1 This broader chronological perspective has made it possible to better appreciate both the causes and the consequences of that movement. The focus, understandably, has been on the career of legal and political rights. Less attention has been paid to the long history of educational integration. Still less has been paid to the idea of educational integration. In fact, calls for integrated schooling can be traced back almost to the very beginning of mass public schooling. Educational reformers of the antebellum period repeatedly advocated the mixing of children from different backgrounds, especially those belonging to different classes and religious traditions. They even put into practice something resembling what we mean today by the term integration.2 But they did not call it “integration.” Nor did they regularly contemplate racial integration. Nevertheless, those few occasions when the integration of blacks and whites was openly discussed neither wholly betrayed nor entirely vindicated the broader tradition of inclusive schooling. Instead, the question of racial integration helped to redefine the meaning of a nascent movement to bring boys and girls from different backgrounds together in the schools, investing it with an egalitarian 101

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significance and laying the groundwork for a wider campaign against segregation. The idea of integration emerged along side the growth of mass public education. Into the nineteenth century, primary schooling was supplied by a hodgepodge of private and public institutions, some under the auspices of churches, some financed mainly by private tuition and fees, and others (especially in New England) supported by local tax revenues. Proposals for national and state systems of education began circulating during the last three decades of the eighteenth century. Massachusetts became the first state to require towns to provide elementary education in 1789.3 In the new nation’s larger cities and towns, charity or “free” schools, were opened to provide the poor with a rudimentary education. Still, relatively little money and even less effort was devoted to the cause of universal education until the 1820s. Then, inspired by European examples and utopian social reform, and prodded by the demands of an increasingly industrialized and professionalized economy, the Common School movement began in earnest. Initially centered in New England, this campaign for the simultaneous centralization, reform, and expansion of public education radiated across the northern states and into southern cities during the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. The result was a tax-supported primary educational system that reached a relatively broad cross-section of a rapidly growing population. Public high schools became common too and, by midcentury, most white children, ages seven to twelve (boys and girls alike) could expect to attend school for several months out of the year. Judged merely by the published output of the period the intellectual consensus behind publicly supported universal education was overwhelming. A chorus of voices praised the idea of universal education and “the necessity of educating the masses of the people.”4 From the 1820s through the 1850s, universal education was a touchstone for earnest statesmen and blowhard politicians alike. Few items on the public agenda were less controversial. Knowledge—like air, rainwater, or Christian faith—was understood as a social and individual good that could not be legitimately restricted. The sentiment was summed up by the president of the Western Literary Institute in 1835: “Knowledge is of no country; it is of no exclusive age. It must be free. It is the privilege of all.”5 Horace Mann, Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, articulated the same sentiment in his Eleventh Annual Report (of 1847): “Our law requires that a school shall be sustained in every town in the State,—even the smallest and the poorest not being excepted; and that this school shall be as open and free to all the children as the light of day or the air of heaven. No child is met on the threshold of the schoolhouse door, to be asked for money, or whether his parents are native or foreign, whether or not they pay a tax,

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or what is their faith. The schoolhouse is common property.”6 “All about it [were] enclosures and hedges . . . forbidding intrusion.” By contrast, the state supported school was open to all—a common field of knowledge, where all young minds might freely graze. All children were not, in fact, welcome. A number of early state systems (even in the North) were designated for white students only; manual laborers and factory workers often could not afford to send their children to school; and, the education of girls sometimes took a backseat to that of their brothers. More subtle forms of segregation riddled the nation’s educational system, such as separate recesses and separate entrances for boys and girls in the elementary grades, that spoke to the degree to which nineteenth-century Americans were willing to tolerate “mixing” or “mingling” (the choice of terms was significant) among their children. The rhetoric of early educational reformers, however, told a different story. Indeed, the florid invocations of universal schooling very often led educational reformers to the virtues of educating children from different backgrounds together—of “mingling” the sons and daughters of professionals, tradesmen, farmers, factory workers, orthodox Congregationalists, pious evangelicals, Unitarians and Catholics, the American-born, as well as German and Irish immigrants. It was certainly possible to envision a publicly supported system that enrolled children in culturally specific schools, but that was not what caught the imagination of Common School reformers. Integration, limited as it may now appear in our eyes, was at the heart of the reformist project from the beginning. No form of integration was embraced as enthusiastically in antebellum America as the mixing of rich and poor together. In 1826, the leading educational reformer and Massachusetts state legislator, James G. Carter, warned of a bleak, fractious future if a publicly supported system of class-integrated education was not developed. When “the best schools in the land are free all the classes of society are blended. The rich and the poor meet and are educated together.” For Carter, the promise of the public schools included the possibility of dispersing economic benefits broadly, of leveling the playing field, and thereby preventing the fossilization of inherited social positions.7 That same year, the Virginia lawyer and politician Charles Fenton Mercer worried about widening economic inequality in the country and the potential for major social conflict. The education of rich and poor children together in the schools was the best hope of bolstering society’s “middle ranks,” preserving social harmony, and avoiding the degrading distinctions of class.8 For Samuel Lewis, the first superintendent of Ohio’s schools, the education of the poor was a momentous end in itself. But there was an end of still greater importance: class harmony. In an 1835 address, Lewis expressed his conviction that the Common Schools must be improved so that the wealthy would send

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their children to school with the poor, generating “a general acquaintance and attachment . . . that will thereafter, in every change, bind all parts of society together.”9 In the public schools, an author for the Illinois Teacher (1857) wrote: “The children of the rich and the poor, the high and the low, are all on one common level; rewards and punishments come alike to all, without distinction of wealth or parentage; and attachments and associations are formed which ‘death alone can sever.’”10 Religious differences created another cultural breach through which the value of universal education, across group lines, might be asserted. Appeals to the value of universal, integrated education could be found even amid the vitriolic Bible Wars that Protestant and Catholics waged in major urban areas during the 1840s and 1850s. In stark contrast to the anti-Catholic rhetoric that pervaded contemporary newspapers and books, leading Protestants who appealed for Catholic attendance at the public schools used language that actually invited social interaction. “Let the Catholics mingle with us as Americans,” the great evangelist Lyman Beecher wrote, “and come with their children under the full action of our Common Schools and republican institutions, and we are prepared cheerfully to abide the consequences.”11 In New York, trustees of the Public School Society argued that their nondenominational system allowed future citizens to “mingle,” or “amalgamate together,” by “interchanging the same kind and benevolent feelings.”12 The leading Protestant theologian Horace Bushnell expressed his conviction that more “Christian truth” could be “communicate[d] . . . to a Catholic and a Protestant boy, seated side by side, in the regulation of their treatment of each other” than catechisms or stale biblical exercises could ever supply.13 Educational reformers occasionally aimed a similar language at immigrants (especially German-speaking immigrants). Addressing the Emigrant Friend’s Society, the prominent biblical scholar, educational reformer, and husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Calvin E. Stowe, gushed about the virtues of “receiv[ing] the wandering stranger, . . . [providing] for the wants of his mind, and prepar[ing] him for usefulness, elevation, and happiness as a citizen of our own happy country. “14 The danger lay in the prospect of “mingling without coalescing,” which had proved the bane of the Roman Empire, and might of this great empire as well.15 “The most effectual, and indeed the only effectual way, to produce this individuality and harmony of national feeling and character,” he enjoined his audience, “is to bring our children into the same schools and have them educated together.”16 The assimilationist intentions inherent in such calls for “mingling” were captured in 1840 by New York’s Public School Society following a proposal by Governor William Seward to extend government aid to parochial schools. Disclaiming “a want of sympathy for the

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oppressed of other lands, who seek an asylum,” the Society’s Executive Committee stated its conviction that: the sooner such persons abandon any unfavorable prejudices with which they may arrive among us, and become familiar with our language, and reconciled to our institutions and habits, the better it will be for them, and for the country of their adoption. If this be true, the best interests of all will be alike promoted by having their children mingle with ours in the public seminaries of learning.17

Though they often aimed at what is often disparagingly called “assimilation,” appeals for the “mingling” of native-born and foreign-born—like those for Catholic and Protestant, poor and rich—suggest a widespread inclination to educate culturally distinct groups of children in the same classrooms. One could certainly quarrel with the evidence presented so far—the selective deployment of quotations from a relatively narrow group of educational reformers. As Michael Katz astutely observed four decades ago, the volume of printed opposition to early state supported schooling might have been negligible, but the votes against it were not.18 Considered merely as a principle, however, universal and integrated education was about as popular as an expensive idea could be in antebellum America. Considered in the abstract, it aroused little explicit opposition, few organized networks of resistance, and no enduring counter-ideas.19 But the principle of universal and integrated education did confront two challenges that would fundamentally alter its meaning and give birth to our modern understanding of integration. The first challenge came from the Roman Catholic church, whose American leaders initiated a nationwide movement for parochial schools by the 1850s premised on the idea that the religious “mingling” Protestants lauded was the “mixed education” they feared, that the joining of Protestants and Catholics in combined religious exercises “embarrassed” the “consciences” of Catholic children, and subverted their faith.20 A second challenge came from racial segregationists (in the North as well as the South; among the supporters and the opponents of educational reform), who warned of the consequences of “promiscuous mingling,” of racial “mixing” of whites and blacks—and who proposed that segregated schools could be justified within an otherwise universal system of education because they represented just another form of educational “classification.” Both the Catholic challenge and the racial segregationist challenged turned, in different ways, on something that had been surprisingly marginal to the reformist argument for universal education: the doctrine of equality. One of the striking things about the early movement for universal education was the relative absence of positive equality talk. While

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legal and political equality was generally presumed in the speeches and writings of the most prominent reformers, it was largely an unstated assumption built into the logic of the systems they were building. Why unstated? Perhaps because elite Americans (including many of those who favored integration) harbored deep reservations about democratic government. It would be difficult to exaggerate the contrast between the effusive celebrations of popular, universal education in antebellum America with the dark forebodings about the dangers of rampant demagoguery and mob rule. The social and political context helps explain these attitudes. After all, middle- and upper-class Americans were not comforted by the thought of a thin, blue line separating them from their unruly and impoverished neighbors. There were as yet no professional police forces in the nation’s increasingly modern cities. For security, they relied upon a motley assortment of security instruments, especially the local constable and the militia, that is, on men who were not always on the ready, or always armed. They also relied upon the capacity of ordinary people (voters and rioters alike) to exercise good judgment, or at least restraint. In sum, this precarious experiment in republican government and urban living depended upon the education of the masses. The alternative was almost too grim for contemporary elites to contemplate. As one early educational reformer put it: “We boast it as a distinguishing feature of our institutions, that all power lies with the people. This is well, while the people are capacitated to use it intelligently and wisely; otherwise it is but a knife in the hands of a maniac.”21 Likewise, almost as soon as Calvin Stowe insisted upon the urgency of welcoming immigrant children into the common schools, he assured his audience “that unless we educate our immigrants, they will be our ruin.”22 “[W]e have no choice left,” he continued. “These people are in our midst; they are coming among us more and more: and we must labor, we must labor incessantly and perseveringly to prevent the evils, and to secure the good which may arise from their association with us.”23 No one made a more influential or persistent case for integrated schooling than Horace Mann. Nor did anyone illustrate better how easily equality could be thought of as a limiting condition, rather than a desired outcome, of educational reform. Mann made it clear to the readers of his First Annual Report (1837) as Secretary of the newly created Massachusetts Board of Education that if “the intelligent portion of society” kept its students out of the public schools for fear that they would be infected by children “addicted to profanity” and “vulgar and mischievous habits,” they would only postpone the inevitable. Eventually their own dear children would be compelled to associate with the other “five-sixths,” whose schools they had turned their back on.24 Mann reiterated that sentiment a few years later: “Whatever children, then, we suffer to grow up amongst

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us, we must live with as men; and our children must be their contemporaries. They are to be our copartners in the relations of life, our equals at the polls, our rulers in legislative halls; the awarders of justice in our courts.”25 It is true that we would not expect a lot of enthusiasm for popular democracy from a relatively elite body of antebellum reformers with conservative political sympathies, like Horace Mann. It is also true that some educational reformers, such as Robert G. Carter and Charles Fenton Mercer, regarded social equality was one of the chief aims of universal public education.26 Still, the fact that leading proponents of universal education treated equality as an unavoidable feature of antebellum America is significant, and essential to understanding the novelty of the arguments regarding religious and racial segregation. The earliest, most conspicuous, and most enduring opposition to universal, integrated schooling in the nineteenth century came from the Roman Catholic church and its American leaders. So-called “Bible Wars” raged across urban areas in the 1840s and 1850s as Catholics and Protestants clashed over the religious character of their public schools. The United States was a predominantly Protestant nation in the early nineteenth century. Only a small fraction (probably less than five percent) of the population was Catholic, and its members were primarily native born and of English heritage. Then, between the mid-1830s and the 1850s, millions of Irish immigrants, fleeing starvation in their homeland, arrived on American shores. It would be hard to exaggerate the impact on American society. By 1860, one-third of Boston’s population was foreign-born. The vast majority of these new arrivals were poor, Irish, and Catholic. Beginning in 1854, the Know-Nothing Party burst onto the national political scene, decrying “Romanism,” exalting “Americanism,” and promoting extended naturalization periods for immigrants. Though the KnowNothings proved short-lived, the accompanying tensions fueled the Catholic campaign to establish an independent parochial school system. As mid-century Catholic leaders saw it, a fundamental defect of the public schools was that they were run by Protestants who imposed antiCatholic religious instruction, promiscuously mixed Protestants and Catholics together in religious exercises, and compelled Catholic children to read Protestant Bibles. Recent scholarship has qualified earlier claims about the prevalence of scripture in the classroom.27 Nonetheless, the Bible (available in many different versions, both Protestant and Catholic, by the mid-nineteenth century) played a pivotal role as a symbol of the differences between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. The policy of reading the good book “without note or comment” was about the most inclusive gesture that the majority of Protestants could envision. Yet, aggrieved Roman Catholics interpreted this strategy as a bigoted plot against their faith To them, contemporary Protestant appeals for

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“mingling” implied that there would be a fusion of distinct religious practices in the schoolrooms, and that Catholic children would imbibe the sectarian, anti-papal sentiments of their Protestant counterparts. By contrast, Protestant reformers seem to have intended their appeals for “mingling” as calls for social interaction between children of different faiths and classes. They saw Bible reading as a practice that could be carried on independently of substantive religious practice or formal religious authority. Undoubtedly, many Protestants would have welcomed the opportunity to extract Catholic children from what they saw as a domineering, aggressive, and anti-republican church. But much of the public rhetoric from the nineteenth century contains few such implications. Instead, the emphasis was on the value that young Americans and future citizens could derive from a common education. The indomitable Roman Catholic bishop, John Hughes of New York, stood at the vanguard of efforts to make state funds available for parochial schools, and later, to pull Catholic children out of the public school system. Among other grievances, Hughes castigated New York City’s educational authorities for attempting to convert Catholic children to Protestantism under the guise of “nonsectarian” faith instruction.28 The evils of the educational system went still deeper, however. To Hughes and like-minded Catholics, public schools robbed parents of their right to educate their children in their own faith tradition and afflicted them with the stigma of inferiority. Even when direct proselytization was not at issue, the dignity and self-worth of Catholics was, especially where the textbooks burgeoned with anti-Catholic history and rhetoric. “Have you not seen the young Catholic,” Hughes asked, in striking anticipation of the language used in Brown v. Board of Education, “whose mind has been filled with these calumnies, half ashamed, when he enters the world, of his Catholic name and his Catholic associates, regarding them often as an inferior, worthless set?”29 On another occasion, Hughes asked: What! Is this country independent of religion? Is it a country of atheism, or of an established religion? Neither the one nor the other; but a country which makes no law for religion, but places the right of conscience above all other authority—granting equality to all, protection to all, preference to none. And while all these documents have gone on the presumption of preference, all we want is that we may be entitled to protection and not preference. We want that the public money shall not be employed to sap religion in the minds of our children—that they may have the advantages of education without the intermixture of religious views with their common knowledge, which goes to destroy that which we believe to be the true religion.30

Inter-religious mingling represented a dangerous form of theological “mixing” for the Bishop and the many Catholics who followed his lead.31

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Both dignity and the equal protection of the laws (equal rights) were at stake in Catholic opposition to universal, integrated schooling. As we have already seen, Protestant response to these Catholic challenges was formulated at least partly in ecumenical terms. Leading Protestant reformers called upon Roman Catholics to bring their children into the public schools so that they could “mingle” with Protestant children. We might dismiss these statements as little more than empty gestures if contemporary Protestants had not tried so hard to persuade Roman Catholics to send their children to the public schools, as well as making provisions for it to happen. In New York, the Public School Society responded to Catholic critiques by blotting out offensive passages from the textbooks or simply pasting pages together.32 In Baltimore, school authorities allowed Catholic students to bring their own (Catholic Douay) Bibles to class.33 During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the city of Cincinnati simply banished Bibles from its classrooms.34 A significant faction of the Cincinnati school board justified their campaign to take the Bible out of the public schools on grounds that are worth mentioning. They: thought it more important to educate all the children of our city in common, so that they may grow up together in our schools and thus learn by daily intercourse to love and respect each other and to work in harmony for the common weal, than to continue a practice, itself of doubtful utility, the practical effect of which was, and is, to separate our children into opposing factions, and thus leave them to grow up in suspicion and distrust of each other.35

A less well-articulated and gradual movement to move Bible-reading to the peripheries of the school day—outside the realm of formal instruction and careful study, and into brief ceremonies that opened and closed each day—supplemented these more direct efforts to accommodate Catholics, and, to a lesser extent, other religious groups. Such Protestant concessions are usually associated with a trend toward secularization, or a growing separation between church and state. But it may be worth understanding the deliberate de-biblicization of the classroom as a significant development in the nation’s history of educational integration, and, more specifically, as a reflection of a more egalitarian conception of universal, integrated education. The contrast with the approach to African American schooling is stark. Unlike Roman Catholic children, African American children were rarely welcomed into classrooms with children of different backgrounds. More than ninety percent of the antebellum African American population was enslaved, and generally forbidden from even acquiring literacy. The free population, dwelling mainly in coastal urban areas, was generally consigned to separate, racially exclusive schools, either by law or custom.36 In

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some larger cities, notably Boston and Providence, a significant minority of the African American population favored segregated schools where they would not be subjected to the insults of bigots or the low expectations of white teachers.37 However, a healthy majority of the African Americans that weighed in on the issue, along with their white abolitionist allies, maintained that racially determined schools were intrinsically unequal and that they underwrote an emerging racial “caste” system within the republic.38 The defining mid-nineteenth-century clash over racial integration took place in 1849, at the ideological hub of both the Common School and abolitionist movements: Boston, Massachusetts. There, the school committee was resisting efforts to desegregate its white schools (something that other Massachusetts towns had already done) and abolish its existing black schools. The defining pre-Brown v. Board argument for racial integration would be delivered by Charles Sumner, representing Benjamin Roberts, an African American printer and abolitionist. Roberts had brought suit against the city on behalf of his five-year-old daughter who was compelled to attend an all-black school even though she passed five white schools on her way there. Despite the broad-minded interpretations of legal historians Leonard Levy and Morgan Kousser, neither the case nor Sumner’s argument has been given its due as a landmark in the history of American thought, nor fully appreciated for how it reshaped previous understandings of universal education and the meaning of integration contained within them.39 To make his case against the exclusion of Sarah Roberts, Charles Sumner had to confront the segregationist doctrine that assigning blacks and whites to separate schools was simply another rational form of classification, like the graded school, or the gendered classroom, and that racial mixing in the schools represented an organizational flaw. Sumner’s ideological and legal burden was to change the terms of debate away from expediency—that is, from the notion that racial classification was just one more reformist effort to impose desperately needed order on an unruly school system (and, by extension, an unruly populace), to equity—to the notion that racial classification constituted a means of formalizing informal social distinctions, or “castes” as he chose to call them. In other words, he needed to shift the discussion from legal concept of “classification” to the social concept of “class.” In making this argument, the future Senator owed a great deal to black and white abolitionists who had been railing against “caste” schools for more than a decade. But Sumner also owed something to the rhetoric of Common School reform that had promoted not just universal education, but integrated universal education. Sumner had a problem, in that his argument rested partly on a myth, one more fantastic than those maintained by his fellow reformers. His

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argument rested partly on the fiction that adult society was already integrated, that whites and blacks met on equal terms in civil society. In fact, the desegregation campaign had only just begun in Massachusetts. Racially separated railroad cars were now prohibited and interracial marriages permitted. Still, neither black and white intermingling nor equal treatment in social life was the norm, and African American men were denied voting rights. Thus, to make his case, Sumner would have to build the principle of equality into his argument for racial integration, not as an inescapable fact of social life, but as a promise implicit in the law itself. And that is what he did. “[A]ccording to our institutions,” he wrote, “all classes, without distinction of color, meet in the performance of civil duties, so should they all, without distinction of color, meet in the school, beginning there those relations of equality which the Constitution and Laws promise to all.”40 Legal scholars have rightly concluded that the principle being developed here was that of equal protection before the law, of nondiscrimination, which would constitute the central plank of the Fourteenth Amendment.41 What has not been emphasized, however, is the degree to which Sumner (1) treated African Americans as a social class and (2) introduced equality as one of the chief ends of universal, integrated education. A second, related, challenge faced Sumner. He had to take on the oftrepeated claim that white prejudice was simply too severe, that African Americans were repugnant to whites, and would be subject to repeated humiliations if they were “promiscuously mingled” together in the schools. Segregationist judges and educational policymakers in the antebellum North professed that they lamented this popular “custom,” but could not afford to ignore it. Sumner’s response was to emphasize the harm done to African American children who would be “deprive[d] . . . of those healthful, animating influences which would come from participation in the studies of their white brethren.”42 Sumner also ventured an opinion that very few others would dare to utter in the nineteenth century, that “whites themselves [were] injured by the separation.”43 Segregation damaged impressionable young hearts and minds without regard to color.44 “Nothing is more clear,” Sumner insisted, “than that the welfare of classes, as well as of individuals, is promoted by mutual acquaintance. Prejudice is the child of ignorance. It is sure to prevail, where people do not know each other.”45 Not just the equity, then, but the very success of the reformist project in transforming potentially wayward children into upright citizens, depended on racially integrated schools. Like so many Common School reformers before him, Sumner held out the threat of educational and political fragmentation. Exclude black children from schools because of their race and “[w]e shall then have many different schools, representatives of as many different classes, opinions, and prejudices but we shall look in vain for the true Common School of Massachusetts.”46

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Sumner failed in 1849, and Benjamin Roberts lost his case. Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw reaffirmed the School Committee’s right to classify its students according to its best judgment. Nevertheless, the influence of the line of argument developed by Sumner was evident a few years later when the racial segregation of the schools again came under formal scrutiny. An 1854 Report of the Committee of Public Instruction insisted that “[e]very friend of law and order should be in favor of allowing all classes of citizens to participate equally, as well as generally, in the privileges of our public schools; for our republican government is founded upon the general intelligence of our citizens.”47 The law passed in 1855, by a Know Nothing-dominated Massachusetts legislature, was nearly as broad in its incorporation of nondiscrimination into the universal school ideal. “In determining the qualifications of scholars to be admitted into any public school or any district school in this Commonwealth,” it stated, “no distinction shall be made on account of the race, color, or religious opinions of the applicant or scholar.”48 Similar laws were not immediately passed in other states. But a more expansive conception of integration as the defining element in public schooling may have been gaining traction. Just two years after the passage of the 1855 Massachusetts law, George T. Downing, a leading African American integrationist, maintained that the system of racially segregated schooling in Newport, Providence, and Bristol, Rhode Island, was a threat to the entire system of common, public schooling.49 In a work, titled Will the General Assembly Put Down Caste Schools?, Downing wrote: “we are opposed to these separate schools from principle, as proscriptive, depressing, as not carrying out the idea of a public school.”50 The same schools that could exclude African Americans could exclude the ordinary farmer and the humble tradesman on the same ground. Like Sumner, Downing stressed the importance of continuity in social life: Why couldn’t white and black children who played together in the streets go to school together? Downing also raised the specter of religious segregation and called for the passage of a law identical to Massachusetts. He quoted from the Rhode Island Commissioner of Public Schools who said of large public schools: “Here the children of the rich and the children of the poor meet together, and each class exerts a good influence upon the other.”51 And in what may have been a conscious reworking of a passage from Horace Mann’s Eleventh Report (where the Secretary had written: “No child is met on the threshold of the schoolhouse door, to be asked for money, or whether his parents are native or foreign, whether or not they pay a tax, or what is their faith”), Downing wrote: “We are taxed for a High School, but its doors are barred against us; the sons of the rich and others enjoy its advantages, we in part pay for its teachers and the like, but cannot pass its

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threshold.”52 The desegregation drive was narrowly defeated in the Rhode Island legislature in 1860. Like similar efforts in other northern states (and some southern states as well), it would take a civil war to bring about the first wave of legislative restrictions against schools segregated by “race or color.”53 For the moment, in this region of the country, amid a nativist awakening and a general outcry against the new fugitive slave law, the reformist commitment to social mingling and the abolitionist commitment to social equality were joined together. But it was a peculiar moment and an uneasy combination. Racial segregationists were already conflating social interaction between white and black children with biological amalgamation. Defending an 1853 law that segregated Ohio’s schools, Chief Justice William Peck wrote: “It is a law of classification, and not of exclusion, intended and designed to place in one school all the white youth, and in the other, all who have any visible taint of African blood.”54 Though suggesting that the court might wish it were not so, Peck insisted that white prejudice was simply too sharp to allow for integrated schooling. There was a “natural repugnance of the white race to communion and fellowship with them [African Americans],” a “repugnance felt by many of the white youths and their parents to mingling, socially and on equal terms, with those who had any perceptible admixture of African blood.”55 Joining together two segregationist tropes—educational classification and ineradicable popular prejudice, Peck articulated the argument that first crystallized in the Roberts case and persisted into the twentieth century—that separate schooling was not only compatible with civil equality but absolutely essential to the survival of public education itself. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) made citizenship national and forbade states from “enforce[ing] any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor . . . life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor . . . the equal protection of the laws.” As Davison M. Douglas and Richard Klarman have suggested in their comprehensive surveys of American school segregation, this Amendment provided ample justification for the establishment and preservation of black schools. It did not, however, supply the necessary juridical force to mandate or maintain integrated schools.56 Somewhere along the way the emerging constitutional doctrine of equal protection was decoupled from the reformist virtue of “mingling” between groups and its association with other forms of intergroup divisions. For good reason, post-Civil War desegregation statutes were aimed at outlawing “race” and “color” as criteria for exclusion (as did the Fifteenth Amendment). Racial discrimination clearly constituted the most egregious violation of American pretensions to extend the umbrella of legal equality to all of its citizens. But

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the fact that “religion” was left out of these constitutional formulations may be significant. The disassociation of African American education from the broader Common School movement left only the doctrine of equal rights to support the case for integration. The Common School movement experienced a different fate.57 Bereft of its association with the radical and egalitarian principle of racial integration, sapped of its early utopianism, and overwhelmed by wave after wave of European immigration, the idea of universal education centered increasingly on assimilation and the jettisoning of distinctive cultural characteristics. The defining statement of mainstream Protestantism on the subject may have been provided by Josiah Strong, author of Our Country, who wrote: “The public school is the principal digestive organ of the body politic. By means of it the children of strange and dissimilar races which come to us are, in one generation, assimilated and made Americans.”58 For their part, Roman Catholics emphasized the rights of parents to determine their children’s educations. By the end of the nineteenth century, an equal right to educate Catholic children in their own faith tradition become an individual right, more akin to a right in property, than a right to equal dignity or opportunity. Nonetheless, the principle of universal education never entirely lost its association with the value of “mingling,” nor the possibility of fulfilling the national promise of equality.59

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER 1) How is integration related to multiculturalism? Was Horace Mann a multiculturalist? 2) According to Charles Sumner’s (in the excerpt from his argument in Roberts v. Boston), what were the benefits of educating children from different backgrounds together? Is this true today? 3) Compare Beneke’s argument to Adelman’s in chapter four. 4) How has integration been justified in the twenty and twenty-first centuries? How do recent arguments for integration differ from those in Horace Mann’s era?

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IN THEIR WORDS: CHARLES SUMNER ARGUES SCHOOL EQUALITY Leonard W. Levy and Douglas L. Jones, eds., Jim Crow in Boston: The Origin of the Separate but Equal Doctrine (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974), 182–183, 184–185, 198–199, 202, 211, 212. Original Source: Charles Sumner, His Complete Works, 20 vols. (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1900) 3: 51–100. Charles Sumner, “Equality Before the Law: Unconstitutionality of Separate Colored Schools in Massachusetts.” (Argument before the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, in the Case of Sarah C. Roberts v. The City of Boston, December 4, 1849.) The Legislature of Massachusetts, in entire harmony with the Constitution, has made no discrimination of race or color in the establishment of Common Schools. Any such discrimination by the Laws would be unconstitutional and void. But the Legislature has been too just and generous, too mindful of the Bill of Rights, to establish any such privilege of birth. The language of the statutes is general, and applies equally to all children, of whatever race or color. The provisions of the Law are entitled, Of the Public Schools, meaning our Common Schools. To these we must look to ascertain what constitutes a Public School. Only those established in conformity with the Law can be legally such. They may, in fact, be more or less public; yet, if they do not come within the terms of the Law, they do not form part of the beautiful system of our Public Schools,—they are not Public Schools, or, as I prefer to call them, Common Schools. The two terms are used as identical; but the latter is that by which they were earliest known, while it is most suggestive of their comprehensive character. A “common” in law is defined to be “open ground equally used by many persons”; and the same word, when used as an adjective, is defined by lexicographers as “belonging equally to many or to the public,” thus asserting Equality. (182–183) *** I conclude, on this head, that there is but one Public School in Massachusetts. This is the Common School in Massachusetts. This is the Common School, equally free to all the inhabitants. There is nothing establishing an exclusive or separate school for any particular class, rich or poor, Catholic or Protestant, white or black. In the eye of the law there is but one class, where all interests, opinions, conditions, and colors commingle in harmony—excluding none, therefore comprehending all. (184–185)

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*** The Committee charged with the superintendence of the Common Schools of Boston have no power to make any discrimination on account of race or color. . . . In the exercise of these powers they cannot put colored children to personal inconvenience greater than that of white children. Still further, they cannot brand a whole race with the stigma of inferiority and degradation constituting them a Caste. They cannot in any way violate that fundamental right of all citizens, Equality before the Law. . . . In entire harmony with the Constitution, the law says expressly what the Committee shall do. Besides the general charge and superintendence, they shall ‘determine the number and qualifications of the scholars to be admitted into the school,’—thus, according to a familiar rule of interpretation, excluding other powers. . . . The power to determine the “qualifications,” though less simple, must be restricted to age, sex, and fitness, moral and intellectual. The fact that a child is black, or that he is white, cannot of itself be a qualification or a disqualification. Not to the skin can we look for the criterion of fitness. (198–199) *** It is clear that the Committee may classify scholars according to age and sex, for the obvious reasons that these distinctions are inoffensive, and that they are especially recognized as legal in the law relating to schools. They may also classify scholars according to moral and intellectual qualifications, because such a power is necessary to the government of schools. But the Committee cannot assume, a priori, and without individual examination, that all of an entire race are so deficient and proper moral and intellectual qualifications as to justify their universal degradation to a class by themselves. Such an exercise of discretion must be unreasonable, and therefore illegal. (202) *** The law contemplates not only that all shall be taught, but that all shall be taught together. They are not only to receive equal quantities of knowledge, but all are to receive it in the same way. All are to approach the same common fountain together; nor can there be any exclusive source for individual or class. The school is the little world where the child is trained for the larger world of life. It is the microcosm preparatory to the macrocosm, and therefore it must cherish and develop the virtues and the sympathies needed in the larger world. And since, according to our insti-

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tutions, all classes, without distinction of color, meet in the performance of civil duties, so should they all, without distinction of color, meet in the school, beginning there those relations of Equality which the Constitution and Laws promise to all. (211) *** Nothing is more clear than that the welfare of classes, as well as of individuals, is promoted by mutual acquaintance. Prejudice is the child of ignorance. It is sure to prevail, where people do not know each other. Society and intercourse are means established by Providence for human improvement. They remove antipathies, promote mutual adaptation and conciliation, and establish relations of reciprocal regard. Whoso sets up barriers to these thwarts the ways of Providence, crosses the tendencies of human nature, and directly interferes with the laws of God. (212)

h NOTES Work for this article was completed while the author was a fellow of the Jeanne and Dan Valente Center for the Arts and Sciences. He would like to thank Benjamin Justice, Erik Owens, and Ruth K. Spack for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 1. For examples, see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal of American History 91:4 (March 2005): 1233–53; and, Michael Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 2. The term ”integration” existed in the early nineteenth century (it was defined as the “act of making entire”), but it did not refer to the phenomenon we associate it with today, namely the opening of institutions and public spaces to members of distinguishable groups. Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary defines “integration” with characteristic economy as “The act of making entire.” That is still the primary definition that we find in the modern Oxford English Dictionary. However, the OED also includes a secondary definition, which it traces back only to 1940: “The bringing into equal membership of a common society those groups or persons previously discriminated against on racial or cultural grounds.” The 1836 Boston edition of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary does not include an entry for “integrate” [or “integration”]. The word is also not found in George Mason, A Supplement to Johnson’s English Dictionary (London: Printed by C. Roworth for J. White, 1801). Omitted here is the intransitive usage of “integrate” (“also intr., to become integrated”), which reminds us that integration is also often understood as an

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obligation of minority groups to become part of, perhaps by assimilating characteristics of the majority, into the larger collective. See Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (New York: Converse, 1828); Oxford English Dictionary ([Oxford, England]: Oxford University Press, 2000); and, Samuel Johnson and John Walker, Johnson’s Dictionary (C. J. Hendee, 1836). 3. Stanley K. Schultz, The Culture Factory; Boston Public Schools, 1789–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 11. On the early development of public schooling in Massachusetts especially, see Charles Leslie Glenn, The Myth of the Common School (Oakland, CA: ICS Press, 2002), 86. 4. James G. Ramsay, M.D., The Education of the Masses of the People: An Address Delivered at the Request of the Athenaean Society before the Literary Societies of Catawba College, on the 16th day of November, 1854 (Salisbury, N.C.: Miller & James, 1854), 5. 5. Albert Picket, “Opening Address,” Transactions of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Western Literary Institute and College of Professional Teachers, Held in Cincinnati, October, 1835 (Cincinnati: Josiah Drake, 1836), 44. 6. Horace Mann, “Eleventh Annual Report,” in Horace Mann, Felix Pecaut, and Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, Annual Reports of the Secretary of the Board of Education of Massachusetts for the Years 1845–1848 (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1891), 175. 7. James G. Carter, Essays Upon Popular Education, Containing a Particular Examination of the Schools of Massachusetts and an Outline of an Institution for the Education of (Reprint, original dated 1826; New York: Arno Press, 1969), 20. 8. Charles Fenton Mercer, A Discourse on Popular Education; Delivered in the Church at Princeton, The Evening Before the Annual Commencement of the College of New Jersey, September 26, 1826. (Princeton Press, 1826), 32–33, 58. 9. Samuel Lewis, “Report on the Best Method of Establishing and Forming Common Schools in the West,” in Transactions of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Western Literary Institute and College of Professional Teachers, 156. 10. Quoted in John Pulliam, “Changing Attitudes toward Free Public Schools in Illinois 1825–1860,” History of Education Quarterly 7 (Summer 1967), 206. 11. Lyman Beecher, A Plea for the West (Cincinnati, OH: Truman and Smith, 1835), 60–61 12. W. M. Oland Bourne ed. History of the Public School Society (Reprint, original dated 1869; New York: Arno Press, 1971), 185, 247. 13. Bushnell, Horace, “Common Schools,” in Building Eras in Religion (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 97. 14. C. E. Stowe, “Education of Immigrants,” in Transactions of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Western Literary Institute and College of Professional Teachers, 65. 15. Ibid., 69. 16. Ibid., 70. 17. “To the Honorable the Common Council of the City of New York, the Remonstrance of the Public School Society, by their Executive Committee,” in W. M. Oland Bourne, History of the Public School Society (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1971), 185. 18. Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 80. Richard D. Brown notes that opposition to “an informed citi-

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zenry” was registered in the same “persistent” and inarticulate way. See Richard D. Brown, The Strength of a People: The idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 119. 19. This notion is not entirely new. Carl Kaestle once wrote that “unlike England, America witnessed virtually no opposition to popular education per se, only to a structure of state control and financing and to the attempt to gather all groups into a common system with a common curriculum” Carl F. Kaestle Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), x. 20. Francis Kenrick, Letter Ledger, pp. 202–4, Philadelphia Archdiocesan Archives. Quoted in Vincent P. Lannie and Bernard C. Diethorn, “For the Honor and Glory of God: The Philadelphia Bible Riots of 1840,” History of Education Quarterly 8 (Spring, 1968): 56. 21. Quoted in Allen Oscar Hansen, Early Educational Leadership in the Ohio Valley a Study of Educational Reconstruction Through the Western Literary Institute and College of Professional Teachers, 1829–1841 (Bloomington, Ill.: Public school Pub. Co., 1923), 34. 22. C. E. Stowe, “Education of Immigrants,” in Transactions of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Western Literary Institute and College of Professional Teachers, 66. 23. Ibid., 68. 24. Horace Mann, Felix Pecaut, and Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, Educational Writings of Horace Mann (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1891), 416–417. 25. Horace Mann, Felix Pecaut, and Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, Annual Reports of the Secretary of the Board of Education of Massachusetts for the Years 1845–1848 (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1891), 8. 26. See, for example, Mercer, A Discourse on Popular Education, 76. 27. In fact, the Bible may have been used in less than thirty percent of classrooms. See R. Laurence Moore “Bible Reading and Nonsectarian Schooling: The Failure of Religious Instruction in Nineteenth-Century Education,” Journal of American History 86 (March 2000): 1581–1599; and, Benjamin Justice, The War That Wasn’t: Religious Conflict and Compromise in the Common Schools of New York State, 1865–1900 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press), 38. 28. Lawrence Kehoe, ed., Complete works of the Most Rev. John Hughes, D.D., 2 vols. (New York: Lawrence Kehoe, 1865) 1: 85. 29. Ibid., 1: 92. 30. Bishop John Hughes (October 29, 1840) in W. M. Oland Bourne, History of the Public School Society (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1971), 219. 31. Generally more circumspect than his New York counterpart, Bishop Francis Kenrick of Philadelphia echoed his contemporary as he wondered whether “the regulations of the schools may be modified so as to give the Catholic pupils and teachers, equal rights, without wounding tender consciences.” See Francis Kenrick, Letter Ledger, pp. 202–4, Philadelphia Archdiocesan Archives. Quoted in Lannie and Diethorn, “For the Honor and Glory of God,” 56–57. 32. Vincent P. Lannie, Public Money and Parochial Education: Bishop Hughes, Governor Seward, and the New York School Controversy (Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1968), 97.

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33. Lannie and Diethorn, “For the Honor and Glory of God,” 56. 34. Robert Michaelsen, “Common School, Common Religion?: A Case Study in Church-State Relations, Cincinnati, 1869–1870,” Church History 28 (June 1969): 211. 35. Ibid., 216. 36. On racially segregated schooling in antebellum America, see Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1961). 37. See Thomas P. Smith, An Address Delivered Before the Colored Citizens of Boston: In Opposition to the Abolition of Colored Schools on Monday Evening, Dec. 24, 1859 (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1850), 5. 38. On the split among African Americans in Boston, see Arthur O. White, “Antebellum School Reform in Boston: Integrationists and Separationists,” Phylon 34:2 (2nd Qtr., 1973): 203–217. For more on the context in which the controversy in Boston took place, see Arthur Burr Darling, “Prior to Little Rock in American Education: The Roberts Case of 1849–1850,” Massachusetts Historical Society 63 (1960): 126–142; Donald M. Jacobs, “The Nineteenth Century Struggle over Segregated Education in the Boston Schools,” The Journal of Negro Education 39:1 (Winter, 1970): 76–85. 39. Leonard Levy and Morgan Kousser have done their part to make it a landmark of American legal history. See Leonard W. Levy and Harlan B. Philips, “The Roberts Case: Sources of the ‘Separate but Equal’ Doctrine,” in The American Historical Review 56:3 (April 1951): 510–518; and, Morgan J. Kousser, “The Supremacy of Equal Rights: The Struggle against Racial Discrimination in Antebellum Massachusetts and the Foundations of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Northwestern University Law Review 82 (1988): 941–1010. Also see Darling. “Prior to Little Rock in American Education”; and, Douglas J. Ficker, “From Roberts to Plessy: Educational Segregation and the ‘Separate but Equal’ Doctrine,” The Journal of Negro History, 84:4 (Autumn 1999), 301–314. Ficker notes the “that there were judges during the 1880s who were sympathetic to the burdens imposed by segregation upon African Americans. Despite the limitations placed on the Fourteenth Amendment in the Slaughterhouse and Civil Rights decisions, federal and state court judges, when presented with overwhelming evidence of absolute inequality in public educational systems, interpreted equal protection in favor of African Americans.” (308n.) 40. Leonard Levy and Douglas L. Jones, eds., Jim Crow in Boston: The Origin of the Separate but Equal Doctrine (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974), 211. 41. On the long-term legal implications of the case, see Roderick T. Baltimore and Robert F. Williams, “The State Constitutional Roots of the ‘Separate But Equal’ Doctrine: Roberts v. City of Boston,” Rutgers Law Journal 17 (1986): 537–552; Levy and Philips, “The Roberts Case”; Kousser, “The Supremacy of Equal Rights”; and, Ficker, “From Roberts to Plessy.” 42. Ibid., 211. 43. Ibid., 209. 44. Ibid., 210. 45. Ibid., 212. 46. Ibid., 205.

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47. “Report of Committee on Public Instruction, On Case of a Child Excluded from a Public School of This City (Boston, 1854)” in Leonard W. Levy and Douglas L. Jones, eds., Jim Crow in Boston: The Origin of the Separate but Equal Doctrine (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974), 242. 48. Massachusetts House Report, No. 167 (1855), Levy and Jones, 261. 49. George T. Downing, Will the General Assembly Put Down Caste Schools? (Providence, 1857), 2. 50. Ibid., 7. 51. Ibid., 5. 52. Ibid., 6. On Downing’s life, see Lawrence Grossman, “George T. Downing and Desegregation of Rhode Island Public Schools, 1855–1866,” in Rhode Island History, 36:4 (November 1977): 99–105. 53. For a comprehensive survey of legislation forbidding school segregation on the basis of “race and color,” see Davison M. Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle Over Northern School Segregation, 1865–1954 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 83. 54. Van Camp v. Board of Education of Logan (1859), 9 Ohio St. 406. 55. Ibid. 56. Davison M. Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle Over Northern School Segregation, 1865–1954. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 70; Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights. For a discussion of the narrowness of the antebellum concept of equality and its application to the Roberts case, see Baltimore and Williams, “The State Constitutional Roots of the ‘Separate But Equal’ Doctrine,” esp. pp. 550–552. For the most infamously narrow reading of the Fourteenth Amendment (which cited the Roberts case as an important precedent), see Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 163 U.S. 537, 16 S.Ct. 1138. 57. For reasons not yet clear, the bills that desegregated schools in the wake of the Civil War forbade discrimination did not include religion (unlike in Massachusetts 1855 legislation or in the subsequent proposals made in Rhode Island). On this, see Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North, 83. 58. Strong, Josiah. Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis; Revised Edition, Based on the 1890 Census (New York: Baker & Tyler Co. for The American Home Missionary Society, 1891), 92. 59. Even the much maligned Strong echoed Common School rhetoric about the value of integration just a few pages after his injunction for assimilation: “Nonintercourse nourishes suspicion, prejudice, and religious bitterness, of which the world has had quite enough already. There are many reasons why children of different religions and different races, of rich and poor, of all classes of society, should mingle in the public school. This segregation of the Catholic children, though well intended, inflicts injury upon society and a greater injury upon the Catholic children themselves.” Strong, Our Country, 96.

6 ✛

The Race Problem and American Education in the Early Twentieth Century Tracy L. Steffes

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t the dawn of the twentieth century, Americans defined the “race problem” or “Negro question” as one of the most fundamental issues of the day. The subject of fiery political speeches, professional discussions, special conferences, and countless books and articles, the so-called race problem was at heart a question about the appropriate political, social, and economic roles of African Americans in America, particularly in the South. After decades of conflict and an escalation of violence near the end of the nineteenth century, southerners asserted and northerners largely acquiesced that Reconstruction and its political empowerment of African Americans had been a failure. Legislators groped for new solutions that would restore peace and order to the South, aid in the region’s economic redevelopment, and settle the problem of how to incorporate a supposedly inferior group into a democratic nation. Southerners increasingly took the lead in this effort to redefine black citizenship and race relations in the context of white supremacy although the conversation was also shaped by interventions of northerners and African Americans with competing visions. This discussion of the race problem encompassed a variety of groups with very different arguments and assumptions about race relations, African Americans’ abilities, and black citizenship and yet many of the participants converged on a common solution: education. Their shared 123

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advocacy of education reform in the context of widespread southern indifference or outright hostility to public support of black schools often masked their different priorities. Some white proponents of black education shared the traditional, but ever-shrinking northern view that African Americans must enjoy the full and equal rights of citizenship, including suffrage, even if most believed that blacks were less civilized than whites, either by reason of nature or environment. Education should be used to fit them for the exercise of this equal citizenship. Likewise African Americans, while often marginalized in this discussion, saw education as a pathway to full and equal citizenship, even as they rejected the assumptions of black inferiority often made by whites and disagreed among themselves as to the best educational method and strategy. On the other end of the spectrum, some white southerners viewed education as a potential threat to white supremacy and the racial status quo. This led some to reject all types of education while it led others to reject only the “wrong” kind of education, i.e., literary or higher education. They favored instead a work-oriented industrial education that could be used to socialize African Americans as workers and subordinates and therefore bolster the status quo. Finally, a group of self-identified liberal southern leaders embraced black education reform and argued for unrestricted black educational opportunities so that African Americans could develop to the fullest extent of their ability as junior and unequal partners in the South’s progress. Confident in white supremacy and in the social benefits of education, they did not view black schooling as a threat to the new status quo of the South. All of these groups, despite their differences, endorsed education as a solution to the nation’s vexing race problem and used its terms to press for public and private expansion of southern black education at all levels against tremendous resistance and hostility in the region. This chapter explores the terms of the turn of the century debate over the race problem and education as its possible solution, exploring a range of voices, assumptions, and priorities that were expressed in discourse and reform. Education was a popular, albeit contested, solution for many participants in the debate in part because of its ability to reconcile or at least submerge these tensions. Shared advocacy for education reforms often obscured not only the different assumptions that groups made about black citizenship and ability, but also the nature of education itself. Some supporters of black education viewed schooling as essentially a conservative institution used to exercise control and discipline; it would socialize individuals into the dominant arrangements of society and therefore preserve and strengthen the status quo. For others, education was attractive because of its ability to develop the powers of the individual to reform and challenge the existing order. Both groups ultimately found that education was an imperfect vehicle for their goals and that the same ambigui-

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ties that made it so attractive to so many divergent groups also limited its effectiveness as either an agent of domination or liberation. In June 1890, Albert K. Smiley hosted the First Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question, a gathering of nearly one hundred prominent white citizens in New York state, drawn heavily from the North and from missionary work, to discuss the problem of how to elevate African Americans. A Quaker and member of the Board of Indian Commissioners, Smiley had hosted an annual conference of friends of the American Indian since 1883 at his Lake Mohonk Hotel and had called this conference to attempt a similar discussion of ways to “benefit the Negro race” and to help frame public debate on the issue. In his opening address, Smiley said “I trust that everyone who is here agrees with me that it is exceedingly important for the Negroes to be elevated in every direction” and he laid out the details of this elevation: “it is necessary that they should be practically educated; that they shall learn to be thrifty and taught industries; that they shall do away with all drinking habits, shall save money, accumulate property, be law abiding citizens: that the family relations shall be well observed, and thus be a credit to our country.” According to Smiley, without this moral education “They will become a dangerous element to the demagogues who may use them for bad purposes” and thus “I believe that our only safety is to give the Negro a Christian education.”1 Smiley’s call for a moral education that taught capitalist and Christian values like property accumulation, thrift, temperance, restraint, the work ethic, and family values reflected the dominant assumptions that had been at the center of northern missionary efforts and policy toward freedmen since the Civil War. Motivated by a mixture of paternalism, Christian mission, and political pragmatism, northern Republicans during Reconstruction had invested African Americans with equal citizenship rights, including suffrage, and encouraged schooling to prepare the freedmen for the exercise of good citizenship. They believed, as Reverend A. D. Mayo expressed, that “education is the lever that will raise this great mass of humanity to the higher plane of full American citizenship.”2 Northerners generally agreed that because of racial inheritance and/or circumstance, freedmen were less civilized than whites but they could and should be elevated through education. To that end, northern missionaries, federal agents, and Republicans worked to promote black education during and after Reconstruction, in addition to the efforts organized by freedmen themselves to establish black schools and to institute the beginnings of state public school systems in southern states.3 Northern missionary societies organized hundreds of black schools and colleges across the South and continued to be involved in promoting black education and citizenship in the late nineteenth century, even as northern support for black rights had steadily eroded and the resumption of state government

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control by southern Democrats had resulted in reduced commitments to public education. For Smiley and the majority of conference attendees who had come out of this missionary tradition, the central race problem or Negro question was how best to prepare African Americans to be good citizens and Christian neighbors—the clear answer was education. While the majority of conference participants viewed the problem of black uplift as a problem to be addressed, Albion Tourgee offered a radical challenge to his colleagues which reflected an increasingly minority position among whites. Tourgee, a New York born lawyer who served in the Union Army, had moved to North Carolina after the Civil War where he became an ardent Radical Republican and proponent of civil rights, participating in two state constitutional conventions and serving as a judge during Reconstruction despite repeated KKK threats. In 1896 he would go on to represent Homer Plessey in his challenge to Louisiana’s railroad segregation statute. Tourgee rejected the suggestions of other conference attendees that African Americans had racial deficiencies or were evolutionary laggards, arguing instead that any racial differences in the present were due to white discrimination and the legacies of slavery. To solve the race problem, he argued, “the only education required is that of the white race. The hate, the oppression, the injustice are all on our side.” He critiqued the blindness of conference attendees to northern racism and criticized their tendency to “extol our own excellences and determine what ought to be done with and for him” without ever consulting blacks and he challenged them to remember “that every kindness done the Negro in our land has been only a scanty patch, half-hiding some hideous wrong.” Citing the great debt that white Americans owed black Americans for their labor, Tourgee argued that their “contributions should be recognized with recognition of his rights as a man, and full and free opportunity to share in the fruits of Christian civilization.” According to Tourgee, the nation “whose constitution, laws, courts, and power was used to protect slavery now has an obligation to prove the educational privileges denied to the slave.”4 He thus rejected the terms of the current discussion, arguing that it was not black inferiority that was the real problem but rather white discrimination, a critique that would be echoed by many African Americans at the margins of the debate but rarely advanced by whites. While Tourgee offered a spirited defense of equal opportunity and rejected the assumptions of black inferiority, the overall majority of conference participants believed that African Americans needed education and uplift to overcome current deficiencies, whether they be due to background, environment, or racial inheritance. Reflecting the influence of new racial theories including Social Darwinism, for example, Cleveland editor John C. Covert framed the race problem in terms of racial evolution, arguing that the influences that

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“have lifted the Anglo-Saxons, the Latins, Celts, and Slavs from barbarism to refinement” must be applied to Negroes and others agreed that “the Negro is back in the iron age; the white race is in its golden age.”5 Unlike some of their southern counterparts, however, they agreed that racial uplift was possible and was the moral responsibility of white men, what one speaker called “work which God in his providence so manifestly lays at our feet.”6 Consequently while a few conference participants evinced sympathy with southern insistence that black suffrage had been a mistake, in the end they unanimously approved a platform that recognized blacks as citizens and called for “relations of good will and mutual confidence” between the races based “on principles of simple justice.”7 Even those who admitted misgivings about black evolutionary development, suffrage, or criminality agreed that African Americans should have in the words of Reverend Lyman Abbott, “a free field and an open-race course,” because every citizen should have the opportunity to “find his own place by his own courage, energy, and enterprise.”8 Although many supporters doubted whether significant change was possible in the immediate future, their Christian and democratic sensibilities prompted them to call for expanded educational opportunities for blacks. The northern paper, The Independent, showed how beliefs in innate black inferiority and equal citizenship could be held simultaneously: “It is not that we fail to recognize the intellectual superiority of the Southern whites over the negroes, but we hold, and must hold, that equality of rights and privileges for white and black is God’s only solution, is the law of justice and happiness.”9 However, even at the moment the Mohonk Conference was deliberating the race problem, the northern missionary leadership it represented was being displaced by southerners who altered the terms of the debate. Southerners had long asserted that the race problem was a local rather than national one, but beginning around the 1890s, northerners increasingly acquiesced as sectional reconciliation advanced economically and culturally, imperialism recast the race problem in new ways, and doubts about black progress grew in the North. Southerners began to dominate discussion of the race problem on the pages of national periodicals to assert their own special knowledge of and responsibility for the issue. Southern efforts to reassert and solidify white supremacy in the South shaped the terms of this debate. Democrats rallied under the banner of white supremacy to counter third party challenges and suppress the black vote. Not only did the level of extra-legal violence directed toward blacks escalate, but states made moves to legally curtail black suffrage first in Mississippi (1890) and South Carolina (1895) and then across the South over the next decade through a combination of new legal devices and constitutional restrictions. At the same time, state-mandated segregation

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expanded throughout the 1890s and then exploded in the early twentieth century after Supreme Court sanction.10 Thus, white southerners vigorously rejected the northern-imposed definition of black citizenship and struggled in the years around the turn of the century to redefine the relationship between the races and the place of blacks in the South. A conference on “Race Problems of the South” held in Montgomery in 1900, reflected these changes and questions. Organized by the newly created Southern Society for the Promotion of the Study of Race Conditions and Problems in the South, the conference invited prominent southern politicians, journalists, educators, and businessmen to discuss the race problem, arguing in this invitation that “any real solution of our race problem can be best approached by the people of the South themselves, and under the leadership of those forces which represent the dominant influences of our own section.”11 In contrast to the Mohonk conference, most attendees believed black suffrage and equal citizenship to be mistakes and they viewed the racial conflict of the past decade, although due largely to white supremacy efforts, as evidence of this failure. Conference participants echoed arguments being widely made in the press and by politicians by 1900, that black voting had led to corruption, waste, and conflict and that as Conference President Hilary Hill put it elsewhere, “the granting of universal suffrage to the Negro was the mistake of the nineteenth century.”12 Mayor Alfred Waddell of Wilmington, leader of a bloody race riot and political coup directed against the city’s black leaders, told the Montgomery conference without a sense of the irony that unrestricted Negro suffrage “means the most ignorant, corrupt, and evil government ever known in a free country” and “social disorder” because blacks exhibited “aggressive race feeling and conduct . . . which endangers the public peace.”13 The question, he argued was not whether to restrict black suffrage but how and he and other conference attendees debated whether educational and property restrictions or the wholesale repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment provided the best course of action. One of the problems with black suffrage beyond the political mismanagement and conflict it sowed, southerners asserted, was that it raised unrealistic demands for black social equality and posed a threat to the racial order. Conference attendees agreed as an article of faith that “social equality” was unacceptable, arguing that racial purity and race aversions were natural and necessary instincts, ideas that were being explored in popular and professional discussions. Milledge Bonham Jr. of Virginia, for example, argued in a professional education journal that “the Southerner’s so-called ‘race prejudice’ is in reality a racial instinct, similar to that which keeps the buffalo from mating with the horse, and the chicken with the duck.”14 Conference speakers and wider public discussion frequently invoked the idea that racial aversions and racial dif-

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ferences were rooted in nature and therefore immutable. Charles Dudley Warner, president of the Social Science Association, told the organization that abolitionists and northerners had it wrong in their “tacit assumption that everything differentiating the black man from the white man was the color of his skin and his lack of opportunity.” They were wrong to ignore “the fact of race, of race tradition, habit, association, and impulse,” argued Warner, and experts now knew that “the black man is not a white man” and his “ethnical inheritance is a tremendous fact that cannot be ignored.”15 This African ethnical inheritance, it went without saying for most whites—although they often said it anyway—was inferior to AngloSaxon racial inheritance. In fact denying this belief and striving for political and social equality hurt blacks, some argued, because it denied them the cooperation and good feelings of whites upon whom they must remain dependent. George T. Winston argued that “The Negro is a child race” and needs the “tutelage” and “friendship and sympathy” of the white race which is the “strongest and best developed race on the globe.” To achieve civilization, “he must aim at white civilization; and must reach it through the support, guidance, and control of the white people among whom he lives” and he must “regain the active friendship and affection of the Southern whites” or face competition he cannot hope to win.16 According to Winston, agitation for suffrage and equal rights only strained this relationship. Thus white southerners were virtually unanimous in their calls for restricted black suffrage, their assumptions of black inferiority, and their rejection of social equality but they differed in degree and what implications they drew.17 Some turn of the century commentators argued that the laws of nature and clear degeneracy of blacks indicated that they were on the path to extinction. Time would solve the race problem. Speaking to the Montgomery Conference, University of Virginia professor Paul Barringer, for example, called the history of the Negro race one of “profound pathos” and argued that all evidence pointed to the fact that “the Negro as a race is reverting to barbarism with the inordinate criminality and degradation of that state” and “is doomed at no distant day, to racial extinction.”18 Others interpreted the laws of nature differently. John Temple Graves argued blacks could not hope to compete with Anglo-Saxon civilization which was the strongest on earth and yet Negros would never stop striving for an impossible political and social equality which he called a “pervading and consuming desire.” According to Graves, “the evil is in the blood of races, the diseases is in the bones and the marrow and skin of antagonistic peoples” and therefore the only solution was total separation in the creation of a separate Negro state in the unoccupied regions of the West.19 The creation of a separate black state in the West, or the deportation of blacks to a nation like Congo or Hati, had and would continue to

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provoke discussion among southerners, including the U.S. Congress, as some concluded that no other solution to the race problem was possible and favored voluntary and compulsory schemes of black emigration out of the South.20 These two critiques also mirrored two of the major points southerners often underscored in their rejection of black education: the idea that it was wasted because of the futility of efforts to uplift an inferior people and the somewhat contradictory idea that that education destabilized the racial status quo by feeding unacceptable demands for black equality. Walter Guild, for example, argued that “education does not fit the negro for social or political equality with the white man” and worried that “in the vanity of his newly-acquired and smattering knowledge of books, he is made arrogant and assertive of privileges.”21 An anonymous Alabama white woman writing in the Independent echoed this idea, arguing that too much education could make the negro “a dangerous firebrand” and a “snob to the white man” who “desires to live in the same house with him, sleep in his bed, sit in his church, walk in his garden.”22 Representative of a new wave of southern politicians who rode to office on a wave of anti-black platforms, Governor Vardaman of Mississippi railed repeatedly against black education as wasteful and dangerous. In 1904 he vetoed funding for a public black normal school, arguing “literacy education—the knowledge of books—does not seem to produce any good, substantiate results with the negro, but serves rather to sharpen his cunning, breeds hopes that cannot be fulfilled, inspires aspirations that cannot be gratified, creates an inclination to avoid honest labor, promotes indolence, and in turn leads to crime.”23 This skepticism and outright hostility toward black education voiced in these debates, particularly higher education, was also expressed in turn of the century efforts to scale back financial support for black schools, including repeated proposals to racially divide school funds and more successful efforts to divert school funds from black to white pupils.24 Some southerners shared faith in black inferiority and ambivalence about education but embraced the idea that education, if it was the “right” kind, could be used as a tool to mold African Americans into effective laborers and citizens that rejected social and political aspirations and learned to accept their place. In a speech at the College of William and Mary, for example, Richard E. Byrd argued that blacks were little better than savages and that education thus far had made the Negro “an antisocial product and a public menace” by offering “teaching which he cannot assimilate, and instruction which is intended to develop that which he does not possess.” However, rather than give up on education, Byrd argued that southerners should develop industrial education to train the hand and put the Negro “in a condition of absolute and unquestioned

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subordination.”25 Senator Samuel McEnery of Louisiana made a similar argument that schools in the past had “unfitted the negro for labor of any kind” but that a new system of industrial education could help make him “a wage earner and useful citizen.” McEnery recognized the importance of black labor to the South but had no doubt that whites were destined to rule, arguing history and nature made it clear that “the white race will always control, subdue and keep in subjugation the inferior races.”26 Hoke Smith, governor of Georgia, argued that “racial differences cannot be overcome by misguided philanthropists” and black education must be wholly redone to teach the negro child “manual labor and how to live.” According to Smith, “the large majority of negroes are incapable of anything but manual labor, and many taught from books spurn labor and live in idleness.”27 Consequently, for these reluctant supporters of black education, it was acceptable only if it effectively prepared blacks as workers and conditioned them to accept their subordinate status. These and other eager proponents of New South economic development were drawn to the promises of industrial education articulated by Hampton President Frissell at the Montgomery conference and elsewhere that it would produce “a class of hard-working, docile Negroes, which will place the South in the foreground among the industrial counties of the world.”28 While some white southerners advocated industrial education with an explicit eye toward using schooling as a deliberate instrument of maintaining racial subordination and fitting blacks for their place in the South, other white southerners echoed northern sentiment that education should lift blacks up to the highest plane they could reach. These supporters of black education, who emphasized but did not limit black education to industrial education, were shaped by a range of motivations and differed in their extent to which they thought other doors should be open to African Americans. The most liberal among them supported in theory, if not always in practice, the fair application of voter restrictions regardless of race, although not their repeal, and abhorred lynching and extra-legal violence.29 Many of these advocates of expanded educational opportunities evinced a mixture of Christian benevolence and social selfinterest, echoing Mohonk conference discussions about black uplift for the purposes of reducing crime, improving cooperation, and developing the region economically. They did not advocate equal citizenship, but instead believed the full development of a plan to uplift African Americans could be done within the framework of southern social and economic relations without undermining white supremacy. Judge A. A. Gundy of Louisiana, for example, advocated black education to “convert our thriftless, awkward labor into thrifty, skilled labor, ready for the mine, the factory, the foundry, and all the diversified and developed enterprises that accompany them. Ignorant labor is unprofitable labor.” And yet while

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Grundy believed that blacks had mental limits and their primary role was one of laborer, he did not believe in limiting their educational opportunities. Grundy maintained that “the only limitation should be his capacity and desire to learn” and argued that the rule should be to “give them all of the education they will take and improve.” Grundy did not see education as a threat to the social order because ultimately he believed the mass of blacks not capable of challenging it, and for those talented few who did emerge Grundy argued education would actually bolster rather than undermine racial relations, for as he saw it “the more intelligent the negro becomes the better he understand the true relations and divergences of the races” and therefore “the less he is inclined to social intermingling with the whites.” Education will thus “empathize and widen the social gulf between the whites and blacks.”30 Alabama educator J. A. B. Lovett made a similar argument that education bolstered segregation, arguing that “as intelligence increases among the colored people they are led to see, and they do generally recognize the fact, that there is a line drawn between them and the whites that no human agency can set aside” and that “naturally forbid[s] close social relations with the whites.”31 The editors of The Outlook similarly saw the necessity of full educational opportunities for blacks as consistent with segregation. They argued that “we believe that the negro race will always remain distinct from the white race and will need, and increasingly need, its own lawyers and doctors and teachers and preachers” as well as the ability to support itself.32 Consequently, many of the white leaders of black education emphasized industrial education for the masses but fell short of advocating schooling as a deliberate tool of subordination. Many of these white advocates of black education, despite differences in their rationales, worked after 1900 to overcome the strong resistance to public support for black schools and often used the race problem discussion to support their efforts. At that time, education was beginning to sweep the white schools of the South as a result of efforts by school reformers, including businessmen, educators, and middle-class women’s groups among others, to promote it as a project of regional modernization and development. Southern white school reformers formed the Southern Education Board to spearhead fundraising and publicity campaigns for local efforts in each state. While they focused their efforts on improving white schools, many of these leaders also promoted black education as crucial to regional development and embraced arguments articulated in the race problem discussion about its ability to socialize blacks into appropriate roles, either as drudges or as junior partners in the region’s progress. These white supporters of black education joined with northern industrialists and foundations to financially support public and private black schools as well as to stimulate local and state commitments to black

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education. The Rockefeller funded General Education Board, for example, supported a State Agent of Negro Schools in over a dozen southern states charged with coordinating and promoting black school improvement. The agents were positioned in state education departments where they worked with other state officials, local educators, and communities to prod and encourage them to seek out and match philanthropic support, as well as to build up local opinion and support for black education.33 White efforts on behalf of black education were crucially supported and shaped by African Americans who injected themselves into the debate on the race problem and black school reform despite the tendency of whites to try to marginalize their voices and treat them as the problem to be solved. Not a single African American was invited to participate in either the Mohonk or Montgomery conference and the popular press discussion of the race problem was dominated by whites. Yet African Americans refused to be passive objects of discussion and worked to counter the racist stereotypes and assumptions that pervaded the debate, both through their arguments and through their very presence in the discussion. As some whites begrudgingly admitted at times, the eloquence and accomplishments of men like W. E. B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington demonstrated the potential of African Americans on par with whites and directly refuted some of the most pessimistic arguments about innate black inferiority and degeneration since emancipation. Some African Americans took direct aim at the framing of the race problem debate itself. George Allen Mebane, a black newspaper editor and former Reconstruction era-state senator from North Carolina, responded to the Montgomery Conference by collecting critical responses from black and white newspapers for deliberation by the National AfroAmerican Council. In his highly critical introductory essay, Mebane argued that “so-called ‘Southern or Negro Problem’ was and is a misnomer and their position in demanding the exclusive right to deal with it was both false and arrogant.” According to Mebane, “The persistent efforts to eliminate the negro from participation in the government, as voiced by the Montgomery Conference have ever been the greatest hindrance to the speedy and proper adjustment of all questions pertaining to the so-called problem.” The real question he argued was “Shall the negro be recognized as a man and a citizen, or be again forced into vassalage?”34 Elsewhere, Mebane argued that the race problem, “if there is a problem, it lies in an effort on the part of the negro’s enemies to prove that his condition is worse by his manumission” and in the fact that the “white man is stealing the negro’s rights.”35 William Scarborough, professor at Wilberforce University, similarly protested black exclusion from the conversation and challenged the way that it was framed around supposed black incapacity for citizenship. He argued that the real problem in race relations stemmed

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from white prejudice and the “injustice done him [the Negro] in depriving him of his rights.”36 W. H. Council, President of the Agricultural and Mechanical College in Alabama suggested that this “unfair discussion of the negro has resulted in harm to him.” Critiquing the conversation as full of misrepresentation, slander, and arrogance, he argued that “this effort to show the inferiority of race instead of inferiority of condition” and to “place him [the Negro] outside the circle of humanity has made men cruel to him” and embittered the “ignorant class of whites whose malice knows no bounds.”37 While some African Americans directly challenged the framing of the debate, others used the discussion as a way to advance black education. Booker T. Washington’s direct engagement with the race problem discussion in order to advocate industrial education was one of the most overt and controversial of these attempts. Washington, born into slavery and converted to industrial education as a student at Hampton Institute, was able to leverage tremendous northern philanthropic aid and white southern liberal support for his own Tuskegee Institute and other black schools. Echoing the language of white proponents of black education, Washington argued that industrial education would teach the values of “civilization, self-help, and self-reliance” and teach black youths “not only utility in labour, but beauty and dignity.”38 Washington called for an education “harnessed to the things of real life” and framed Tuskegee Institute around the development of industrial training, practical skill, moral and mental culture. Washington maintained that the goal was not to teach students to work so much as “how to make the forces of nature—air, steam, water, horse-power, and electricity—work for him.” He hoped to “lift labor up out of toil and drudgery into the plane of the dignified and beautiful” and help blacks climb the economic ladder.39 In advocating for industrial education, Washington directly engaged many of the discussions of the race problem to subtly but persistently counter assumptions of innate black inferiority even as he took a conciliatory tone. In 1900, for example, after Mercer University professor John Roach Straton doubted in the North American Review whether black education was worthwhile because of the racial limitations and degeneracy of blacks, Washington responded by thanking Stanton for “the kindly and sincere spirit” of his article and granted that “much that he emphasizes as to present conditions is true,” however he argued that the cause was not due to racial deficiencies but rather the legacies of slavery which required time, patience, and education to eradicate.40 Washington emphasized economic self-sufficiency over agitation for political and civil rights as the best pathway to full and equal citizenship. In his infamous Atlanta Exposition Address in 1895, dubbed by his critics as the Atlanta Compromise, he argued that “the opportunity to earn a

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dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.”41 This seeming accommodation to white supremacy won him many white supporters, including benefactors for black education, who saw him as the model of what education could achieve: an intelligent, productive individual committed to building up the character and work habits of the masses within the framework of segregation and the social status quo of the South.42 While historians have explored how Washington sometimes worked anonymously behind the scenes to challenge this framework, he publicly championed industrial education in deliberately conciliatory terms to cultivate white support. However, Washington’s vision of industrial education differed from his white allies in important ways, a fact that he often successfully obscured.43 Washington rejected any assumptions of black inferiority and believed that by proving themselves economically, African Americans would naturally challenge and break down barriers and prejudice that kept them from full citizenship rights. Washington argued that “Freedom can never be given. It must be purchased.” For Washington, this purchase came in building a material basis for good citizenship through property ownership, thrift, and skilled labor and he believed that the race problem “will work itself out in the South in proportion as the negro’s skill and intelligence and character can produce something the white man wants or the white man respects.”44 In other words, economic success would help blacks prove themselves to whites and make them vital parts of the region that would naturally break down barriers and lead to full and equal citizenship. Washington’s critics, like W. E. B. Dubois, rejected his educational philosophy and strategy, but shared both his goal and his belief that education was the key to individual and collective progress. Dubois rejected the industrial education approach favored by Washington and argued that the key problem was developing the Talented Tenth, an “aristocracy of talent and character,” to uplift the masses. According to Dubois and many other black leaders, the race would be “saved by its exceptional men” and therefore a high priority should be given to ensuring this talented tenth had access to and opportunity for higher education. Dubois and other black educators worried that the emphasis on industrial education for the masses would feed attacks on black higher education or be used as a way to limit access to a broader cultural education for all African Americans. Kelly Miller cautioned that “life is more than meat” and “no system of education worthy of the name can be based upon the temporary expedient of a livelihood” but must instead develop “qualities of mind and soul.”45 Dubois warned that “education and work are the levers to uplift a people” but “Work alone will not do it unless inspired by the right ideals and guided by intelligence” and therefore “education must not simply

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teach work—it must teach Life.”46 Washington’s critics also challenged his disavowal of civil and political rights until blacks had proven themselves economically, arguing that this simply reinforced discrimination. Charles Chestnutt argued that this course was nothing but a “silent submission to injustice.”47 Dubois argued that African Americans “must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.” He chided that “the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and insisting they do not want them.”48 Thus Washington’s critics argued that equal citizenship would only come through challenge, by fighting for their rights under the leadership of the most intelligent and educated of the race. Yet despite these conflicts over the strategy for racial uplift and the best method of education, both camps ultimately saw education as a vehicle for equipping individuals to rise and the race to collectively challenge the discrimination and prejudice that structured the South and the nation. This faith in education was widespread in the black community despite the arguments of many white southerners that the very same institution could be used as a source of stability and control. This faith in education was most poignantly expressed in the extraordinary lengths to which black communities went in order to educate their children. In addition to forgoing children’s labor to send them to school, black parents and communities frequently donated money and labor in order to supplement meager public funds or match philanthropic aid for schools, bearing a heavy burden of double taxation despite their poverty.49 In communities across the South, many African Americans were able to use the discussion of the race problem and white support for industrial education, regardless of its motivation, to promote broader investments in black education. In many communities, as scholars have noted, the resources for black education were so limited that industrial education was simply not feasible without building up a more effective system of elementary and secondary education, including instruction for teachers.50 In other places, African Americans were able to adapt philanthropic support for industrial education programs to promote a much wider variety of improvements in black education. Many black industrial schools, to the chagrin of philanthropists, adopted the name “industrial school” but not the methods and philosophy, using aid largely or entirely to fund programs of liberal education. Likewise, the Jeanes Fund paid the salaries of black women to serve as county industrial supervising teachers, but these Jeanes teachers defined their educational roles broadly: they beautified school grounds; raised funds to extend the school term; provided instructional supervision and support for a range of subjects; formed clubs

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and community activities; and lobbied white school officials for more resources among other efforts. Furthermore, African Americans often subverted the intentions of these industrial education programs by using schools as spaces to nurture black youths, strengthen black community, and deepen racial pride in the face of southern racism. These schools were not the agents of domination that some whites hoped they would be, and instead fostered resistance and resilience as much, if not more, than they encouraged accommodation.51 At the same time, however, African Americans faced serious obstacles in realizing education as a source of opportunity and challenge to the status quo. Most obviously, the extraordinary disparities in the quantity and quality of educational opportunities available to blacks and white students proved a considerable obstacle. As late as 1916 there were only 74 four-year public high schools for African Americans in the entire South. By every measure—spending, physical characteristics, availability—educational opportunities for blacks remained limited.52 Furthermore, education did not melt away economic and social barriers based on race. Many black high school and college graduates found themselves frustrated by the lack of vocational opportunities for education blacks outside of teaching and ministry. Over time, many black educators began to wrestle with the dilemma of how to balance the desire to nurture the aspirations and talents of gifted students and the harsh realities and personal frustrations that came from highly circumscribed options. Should, for example, teachers encourage black students to pursue interests and talents in trades open only to whites in the present or should they steer them toward fields where they might find work? While one might argue that in the long run this education helped to create and nurture a leadership class that led the attack on legal segregation and discrimination, it also left intact the economic and social constraints that severely circumscribed black efforts at achieving the full measure of justice and opportunity.53 Education as a sole or primary strategy left untouched the larger structures of inequity. Consequently it proved to be as problematic a vehicle for liberation, absent other modes of economic and social challenge, as it was for total domination. In 1901, Kelly Miller commented on the way in which most African Americans looked “upon education as possessing talismanic power” and believed that it “would remove every weight which beset him.” Miller warned that this faith in education was overstated, arguing that “education is conservative rather than progressive in its main feature” and its “chief function is to enable the individual to live the life already attained by the race.” By definition, Miller argued, “education prepares for a statical rather than a dynamic condition of society.” Miller recognized that education, especially state-supported education, was a conservative institution that aimed to socialize young people into the dominant economic,

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political, and social relations of society. Education, by design, therefore tended to bolster and replicate the existing order. And yet, while Miller acknowledged its limitations and warned blacks to temper their expectations, he also argued that they must still use education to strive for higher knowledge, to seek truths, and to “be aroused to a consciousness of personal power, to energy of the will, and to individual initiative.” Despite education’s conservative tendencies, Miller held out hope that it could be used to transcend or reform the status quo by empowering the individual to be a force for challenge and change.54 Kelly pointed to a tension at the center of black education reform and the faith with which different groups turned to education to solve the race problem in the early twentieth century. As a process of deliberate socialization, many saw education as a project of social control and restraint, a force for accommodating individuals to the major structures, assumptions, and norms of the status quo. For some white proponents of black education, this control would be overt and deliberate, in order to carve out a space for African Americans as a permanently subordinate caste and accommodate them to this position. For other white proponents of black education, however, education would not be wielded as a weapon but rather a social tool to aid in the development of individuals and adjustment to society. Confident in the generally conservative nature of education and the ultimate superiority of whites, these education reformers viewed black education as a way to bolster and improve the dominant social and economic relations of the South rather than as a fundamental challenge. At the same time, other proponents of black education, namely African Americans themselves, believed that education had elevating and liberating qualities. Ironically they shared this belief with some of the most ardent opponents of black education who feared its potential to undermine the status quo and challenge white supremacy by raising blacks’ aspirations and empowering them to challenge the structures of discrimination. To both of these groups, education held potential to liberate because it could develop the powers of the mind and soul, elevate one’s aspirations, and provide the skills, credentials, and cultural authority to empower individuals to challenge and lead. This dual nature of education as embraced by its supporters—its potential for liberation and its tendency to reinforce the status quo—help to explain its popularity by groups with radically different assumptions about black abilities, black citizenship, and race relations. As in many other education reform efforts, shared advocacy for reform and an ambiguity about the nature of education, helped to build a coalition of supporters by submerging or obscuring their differences. Radical proponents of black equality and white southerners utterly convinced that African Americans were barely a step above savagery both saw education as a way to achieve

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their goals. These competing visions and efforts forced compromises and accommodations which ensured that education would not entirely fulfill the hopes on either end, of domination or liberation. The dual nature of education and the diverse and conflicting goals of its many proponents consequently placed limits on education to solve the race problem to the satisfaction of any one group. For white southerners who hoped to adapt education as an instrument of control and discipline, they found themselves frustrated by the tenacious efforts of African Americans to undermine or adapt these efforts. Segregation may have ironically helped to blunt some of their efforts at domination because the neglect by white school officials and leadership of black teachers and principals helped create a space to nurture black children and teach lessons that counter the dominant messages of white racism. At the same time, of course, this segregation and white neglect also sent a clear message about black citizenship and had significant consequences in terms of resources. White southerners who hoped to use schooling as a form of control also found these ambitions tempered by the American ethos of democracy. While some white southerners had little problem with openly declaring that they favored a permanent caste system, the majority of Americans were uncomfortable with this prospect and sought ways to accommodate a professed commitment to democratic equality with what they saw as the reality of racial inequality. Education scholar William Watkins has argued that many of the chief white architects of black education were complex colonizers who were invested in nation-building and white supremacy but they worried about the creation, or the appearance of the creation, of a permanent caste system in a democracy. Consequently they vocalized support for full development of blacks through education as a nod to this democratic ethos while for the most part having little faith in the ability of most blacks to rise enough to challenge white supremacy.55 Black education, if provided adequately, thus had the potential to legitimate democracy and reconcile it to inequality by offering an opportunity for individual development and mobility according to one’s natural ability in theory. Any failure to rise was thus an indictment of the individual rather than the system. This rhetorical commitment to democracy helped to render the harshest calls for subordination and circumscribing opportunity unacceptable to a majority of Americans, and open up a space, limited though it was, for black efforts, leadership, and resistance. For black southerners who hoped to use education as a mode for uplift and challenge, they found themselves constrained not only by the paucity of education available but by the strategy itself. Their alienation from control of resources and governance of black education limited their ability to use education as a tool for challenge and mobility. More fundamentally,

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however, an educational strategy for challenging white supremacy was incomplete at best. White racism remained relatively immune to education and the social, economic, and institutional inequities it produced were not susceptible to change through education alone. Social and economic inequities remained firmly rooted even as generations of talented, educated African Americans sought to challenge and undermine them. Consequently, the race problem discussion at the turn of the century marked a turning point in an ongoing national conversation on black citizenship and race relations. In embracing education as a solution, a variety of groups found common ground in the ambiguities around education’s nature and purposes. In the end, these divergent visions and assumptions, the complex nature of education itself, and the inherent limitations of education to solve the problem rendered education reform a compromise that never fully realized the hopes of any one group of its supporters.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER 1) According to Steffes, what is the purpose of education in the early twentieth century? Compare this to other arguments made in earlier chapters.

2) In the document First Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question, how did reformers view education as a solution to social and political problems? What do these solutions tell us about education and the society at the turn of the twentieth century?

3) How does this chapter relate to current issues facing American education?

4) Is American citizenship tied to education? Has this changed over time? How? Why?

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IN THEIR WORDS First Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question, Reported and Edited by Isabel C. Barrows (Boston: George H. Ellis, Printer, 1890). www .archive.org/details/firstmohonkconfe00moho General Armstrong, “Industrial Training,” pp. 12–15 Labor is a great moral and educational force. Next to the grace of God, hard work, in its largest sense, is the most vital thing in Christian civilization. Subtract from any neighborhood, within a radius of ten miles, all industry, and in six months, in spite of churches and schools, what would become of order and decency? . . . Of the Negro, I think this labor doctrine is especially true. The Negroes are a laboring people. They do not like work, however, because they have had it forced on them—just as the Indian does not like it because he has not had enough of it. They work under pressure. The great thing is to give them an idea of the dignity of labor; that is, to change their stand-point. Nothing is more important than that they should see that. At the close of the war we had the problem, what shall we do with this race thrown upon us? Under the auspices of the American Missionary Association, I was asked to take charge of the work in Hampton; and we worked the thing out, acting on principles which we have carried out ever since. The great trouble with the Negro was not ignorance: it was deficiency of character. You can feed and clothe the Negro, build his home and give him knowledge; but that does not necessarily build up character. That has got to be worked out. The conditions of character and manhood and citizenship for all people are simple and clear. Our salvation is nearer to us than we suppose. The progress and uplifting of the Negro are attainable more readily than we think. We are convinced that the Negro needs physical as well as mental and Christian training. He needs the ten hours’ drudgery which he gets in the shops to put him in shape for the struggle of life. He must go to his work with an appetite. Slavery taught him to labor, but gave him no respect for labor. This is fundamental. On this foundation idea character is built, men are made, and the problem is solved. Albion Tourgee, “The Negro’s View of the Race Problem,” 104–117 So far as the peaceful and Christian solution of the race problem is concerned, indeed, I am inclined to think that the only education required is that of the white race. The hate, the oppression, the injustice, are all on our

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side; and every Negro who wins the honors of his class in a Northern college, becomes a cashier in a national bank at Topeka, writes a story which New England people read, publishes a newspaper which white people are compelled to peruse, wins a membership in the Boston Press Club, becomes a dry-goods clerk in Chicago, or so good a ballplayer that a crack club has to secure his services lest another should—each and every one of these colored men is a missionary sent of God to the white people of the United States to teach them the fundamental truth of Christianity. . . . We say—perhaps we sometimes even think—that, because slavery no longer exists as a legalized form of society, we may dismiss it from our thought, and no longer consider it as a factor of our civilization. In truth, the conditions it bequeathed are far more difficult and delicate than those attending its existence. It is a living force in the white man’s thought and in the colored man’s life. The lessons it taught to both races are ineradicable by law, and are beyond the control of mere reason. The white man of the South thinks he would rather perish from the earth than be accounted only the equal of the colored man; while the Negro is fast coming to an appreciation of the fact that subordination is only a longer name for subjection. He dare not yield his claim to equality of right and opportunity, even if he would. These irrepressible conflicting tendencies are the heritage of slavery, and the American people who planted and protected this upas tree must see to it that they do not bring a still greater evil. What ought we to do? Let us try to imagine ourselves colored men, with dusky wives and children, and then answer with the fear of God before our eyes! Andrew White, Remarks on Fifth Session, pp. 117–121 I came to this Conference with a heavy heart. I believed then, and I believe now, that there is a great Negro problem. Though not a great traveller through the South, it has been my lot at various times to go through several of the Southern States, to talk with men who are considered leaders, to visit universities, intermediate schools, primary schools, and to glean such information as could be obtained from professors, teachers, and even from the Negro scholar himself. And I have received more from the teachers than from all others—such teachers as are represented at this meeting; and I have felt’ at times that I could kneel before them and kiss their feet for the noble work they are doing, for the self-sacrifices they are making. The main reason for the apprehensions with which I approached this discussion was that throughout the South I have constantly heard talk

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seeming to point toward a terrible future, a struggle between white men and black men for the supremacy. It cannot fail to strike us all that, under slavery, with all its evils, there were some beautiful relations which no longer exist. . . . I suppose that, if this nineteenth century is remembered for anything, it will be, on the whole, as the century which gave to the world the idea of an evolution in human affairs. . . . There is, indeed, an evolution by a simple natural process, a process which is comparatively easy and peaceful, but there is far more frequent evolution by catastrophe, by cataclysm; and I feel now that we are at the parting of the ways between these two. The question is: In this evolution of a better future for the South, for the black man, for the white man, for the whole country, for humanity, are we to have progress by growth or progress by catastrophe? Is it to be a great cataclysm—races projected against each other, destroying each other, with the survival of the fittest, in the worst sense in which that phrase can be brought home to us, or a steady progress by education?

h NOTES 1. Albert K. Smiley, “First Session,” in First Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question, edited by Isabel C. Barrows (Boston: George H. Ellis, Printer, 1890), 8. 2. A. D. Mayo, “The Negro American Citizen in the New American Life,” in First Mohonk Conference, 47. 3. On the educational efforts of African Americans and northerners during Reconstruction, see for example Ward M. McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction: The Public School in the Politics of the 1870s (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998); James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Jacqueline Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865–1873 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Ronald E. Butchart, Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction: Freedman’s Education, 1862–1875 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980). 4. Albion W. Tourgee, “The Negro’s View of the Race Problem,” in First Mohonk Conference, 108, 110, 115–116. 5. John C. Covert, “The Race Problem,” in First Mohonk Conference, 31; General Armstrong, “Industrial Training,” in First Mohonk Conference, 13.

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6. Reverend R. H. Allen, “Industrial Schools for the Negroes,” in First Mohonk Conference, 19. 7. “Platform,” in First Mohonk Conference, 131–134. 8. Rev. Lyman Abbott, Remarks on Third Session, in First Mohonk Conference, 82–84. 9. “Our Attitude to the Negro Problem” The Independent 51 (14 Dec. 1899): 3376. 10. See for example, Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Vintage Books, 1998). 11. Letter of invitation sent by Executive Committee, 4 Jan. 1900, in Race Problems of the South: Report of the Proceedings of the First Annual Conference of the Southern Society for the Promotion of the Study of Race Conditions and Problems in the South (B. F. Johnson Publishing Co., 1900; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 7. 12. Hilary A. Herbert, “The Race Problem at the South: Introductory Remarks” in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 18, America’s Race Problems (July 1901): 99. 13. Alfred Moore Waddell, “The Franchise in the South,” Race Problems of the South, 41–42. 14. Milledge L. Bonham Jr., “The Answer to the Negro Question: Education” Education 28 (Apr. 1908): 508. 15. “Negro Education” The Watchman 81 (17 May 1900): 7. 16. George T. Winston, “The Relation of Whites to the Negroes,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 18, America’s Race Problems. (July 1901): 115–116. 17. George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: the Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Wesleyan University Press, 1987). 18. Paul B. Barringer, “The Negro and the Social Order,” in Race Problems of the South, 193. For similar expressions about black degeneration and the supposed inevitability of racial extinction, see Edward Eggleston, The Ultimate Solution of the American Negro Problem (Boston: Gorhman Press, 1913); J. M. Bicknell, “The Negro Problem” The Arena 29 (June 1903): 611; Thomas Nelson Page, “The Negro: the Southerner’s Problem,” McClure’s Magazine 23 (May 1904): 96–102. 19. John Temple Graves, “The Franchise in the South,” Race Problems of the South, 52–54. 20. For example, R. W. Shufeldt, America’s Greatest Problem: The Negro (Philadelphia, F. A. Davis Co., 1915); Wallace B. Conant, “The Future of the Negro,” The Arena 40 (July 1908): 62; “Trying to Solve the Race Problem,” Chicago Daily Times 25 Dec. 1889: 9; “The Negro Problem,” Chicago Daily Tribune 16 Nov. 1893: 6. 21. Walter Guild, “Have We An American Race Question: A Plea from the South,” The Arena 24 (Nov. 1900): 40. 22. Anonymous, “The Negro Problem: How It Appeals to a Southern White Woman,” The Independent 18 Sept. 1902: 2224.

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23. “Negro Education and the South” The Nation 78, 28 Jan. 1904: 62–63. Vardaman quoted in “A Blow at Negro Education” Current Literature 36 (May 1904): 491. 24. Louis R. Harlan, Separate and Unequal: Public School Campaigns and Racism in the Southern Seaboard States, 1901–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958); Robert A. Margo, “Race Differences in Public School Expenditures: Disfranchisement and School Finance in Louisiana, 1890–1910,” Social Science History 6 (Winter 1982): 9–33. 25. Richard E. Byrd, “What Have Public Schools Done for the Negro and What Can They Do?” (n.p., 1907), 5–7. 26. Samuel Douglas McEnry, “The Race Problem in the South,” The Independent 19 Feb. 1903: 424–427. 27. Hoke Smith’s Inaugural Address quoted in “Freedom Hurts Race,” Washington Post 30 June 1907: 12. 28. Hollis Burke Frissell, “Popular Education in the South,” Race Problems of the South, 88. 29. Edward Mims, “A Liberal Southerner’s View of the Negro Problem: A Plea for Careful Discriminations and the Avoidance of Extreme Positions,” Congregationalist and Christian World, 29 Aug. 1903: 288–289. 30. Judge A. A. Gundy, “The Problem of Negro Education” American Journal of Politics 1 (Sept. 1892): 295–304. 31. J. A. B. Lovett, “The Education of the Negro in the South,” National Education Association Addresses and Proceedings 1890: 500, 504. 32. “The Race Problem,” The Outlook 14 Mar. 1903: 609. 33. See for example, James L. Leloudis, Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); William A. Link, A Hard Country and a Lonely Place: Schooling, Society, and Reform in Rural Virginia, 1870–1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South; Harlan, Separate and Unequal; Adam Fairclough, A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007). 34. George Allen Mebane, “The Negro Problem” As Seen and Discussed by Southern White Men in Conference, at Montgomery, Alabama; With Criticisms by the Northern Press (New York: Alliance Publishing Co., 1900), 4–5. 35. George Mebane, “The Negro Vindicated” in “Have We An American Race Question?” The Arena 24 (Nov. 1900): 5–6. 36. William S. Scarborough, “The Race Problem,” The Arena 11 (Oct. 1890): 566. 37. W. H. Councill, “Is There a Negro Problem?” in “The Race Problem: A Symposium,” The Arena 21 (Apr. 1899): 434. 38. Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (New York: Doubleday, Page, and Co., 1901; reprint, New York: Dover, 1995), 72. 39. Booker T. Washington, “Industrial Education for Negroes” in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of To-day (New York: James Pott & Co., 1903; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969), 16, 24–25. 40. John Roach Straton, “Will Education Solve the Race Problem?” North American Review 170 (June 1900): 785–801; Booker T. Washington, “Education Will Solve the Race Problem: A Reply” North American Review 171 (Aug. 1900): 221.

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41. Booker T. Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address” in Up From Slavery, 109. 42. August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963); Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 43. Robert J. Norrell, “Understanding the Wizard: Another Look at the Age of Booker T. Washington,” Booker T. Washington and Black Progress: Up From Slavery 100 Years Later, edited by Fitzhugh Brundage (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003); Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). 44. Booker T. Washington, “The Education of the Southern Negro,” National Education Association Addresses and Proceedings (1904): 133; Booker T. Washington, “The Influence of the Negroes’ Citizenship,” National Education Association Addresses and Proceedings 1896: 216. 45. Kelly Miller, “the Education of the Negro,” Journal of Social Science 1 (Nov. 1901): 117. 46. W. E. B. Dubois, “The Talented Tenth” in The Negro Problem, 33, 75. 47. Charles Chustnutt, “The Disfranchisement of the Negro,” in The Negro Problem, 111. 48. W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk, (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903; reprint, New York: Dover, 1994), 33. 49. On “double taxation,” see Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South. 50. Fairclough, A Class of Their Own; Link, A Hard Country and a Lonely Place; Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South; Leloudis, Schooling the New South. 51. For examples, see Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South; Fairclough, A Class of Their Own; Link, A Hard Place and a Lonely Country; Leloudis, Schooling the New South. 52. Thomas Jesse Jones, “Negro Education: A Study of the Private and Higher Schools for Colored People in the United States,” United States Bureau of Education Bulletin, no. 38 (1916): 41–42. 53. It is difficult and controversial to try to draw straight lines between black education and the civil rights movement, although many have made that assumption. For a good discussion of this issue see Fairclough, A Class of Their Own and Adam Fairclough, Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001). 54. Kelly Miller, “The Negro and Education” Forum (Feb. 1901): 696, 699. 55. William Watkins, The White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power in America, 1865–1954 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001). Watkins calls many of the white architects of black education complex colonizers rather than evil geniuses, and offers a more nuanced view of intentionality of white philanthropists and educators than as simply capitalists subordinating workers, an interpretation see for example in Donald Spivey, Schooling for the New Slavery: Black Industrial Education, 1868–1915, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978) James D. Anderson, “Education as a Vehicle for the Manipulation of Black Workers,” in Work, Technology, and Education: Dissenting Essays in the Intellectual Foundations of American Education, ed. Walter Feinberg and Henry Rosemont Jr. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 15–40.

7 ✛

Vocational Education, Work Culture, and the Children of European Immigrants during the 1930s Ivan Greenberg

I

n 1917, the United States Congress passed the Smith-Hughes Act mandating federal aid for vocational education. The law became an important catalyst for the expansion of vocational schooling throughout industrial America. While in 1918 approximately 122,000 students enrolled in vocational courses nationwide, within a decade student enrollment increased almost five-fold.1 The literature on vocational schooling generally stresses national developments and the ideological perspective of reformers, business, and organized labor. Very little still is known about the local history of vocational education, especially the impact of vocational schooling on the student population and working-class culture.2 During the 1930s, when trade schools enjoyed increased popularity, the American-born children of European immigrants enrolled en masse in these schools, looking for skilled training which their parents in many cases were unable to provide for them. The second generation inhabited a new workers’ world and adapted to changing industrial demands by learning skills from outside the family. Many white ethnic families recognized, as a Slovak barber in Bridgeport, Connecticut, said, “Now that the times have changed, the type of trades have changed too.” While family work traditions were disrupted by trade school instruction, it was hoped, at least, that “most of the young fellows are learning some trade that is worth something for the future.”3 147

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Did trade schools, by expanding the educational system, provide new opportunities and resources for the working class? Were they democratic reform designed to advance the interests of those at the bottom of the economy?4 In 1914, the National Commission on Aid to Vocational Education submitted a report to the U.S. House of Representatives advocating all-day industrial schools to reduce instability in the labor force and to improve the “discouraging” future of many young workers: As this report has already emphasized, a large majority of the boys and girls in the United States leave school to go to work at 14, and many of them before completing the elementary school. Because of their limited education, their entire lack of skill, and their immaturity, they are obliged to pick up odd jobs as best they can or remain about home to become idlers. They are not old enough to take up a trade nor to enter upon an apprenticeship, and in the main the doors of the more desirable skilled employments are closed to them below the age of 16. The result is that they shift about from one occupation to another, with little or no opportunity to advance in either skill or earning capacity beyond that which brings a meager subsistence. The outlook for their future is discouraging, and it is little wonder that many of them drift out to join the army of the unemployed. In the State of Connecticut the records show that children who go to work between 14 and 16 years of age change their jobs on the average of twice a year.5

Although the combination of child labor and compulsory education laws would compel schooling to age 16 by the late 1930s, there still remained the problem of the proper course of study for what contemporaries derogatorily called the “hand-minded.” Revisionist scholarship emphasizes the social control function of these schools, arguing that vocational education aided business in securing a trained, disciplined, and passive workforce. The schools usually had close ties to local manufacturers and businesses, who helped design their curriculums. By channeling young workers into particular jobs, the schools influenced the development of the working class in ways that reinforced loyalty to corporate capitalism and helped preserve a market system based on vast inequality.6 While much has been written about the skilled worker in the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially their class consciousness and leadership of labor movements,7 very little attention has focused on the ways trade schools influenced their worldview and work politics during the 1930s, or for that matter, during the second half of the 20th century. This chapter addresses some of these issues by studying trade education in the medium-sized, industrial city of Bridgeport. With a population of about 147,000 in 1930, Bridgeport became known as the “Industrial Capital of Connecticut.” The industrial sector included both large and small firms, employing about half the local workforce. While Bridgeport

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sometimes assumed the reputation of being a single industry city geared to munitions and arms production, especially during the two world wars, its industrial base was quite diverse as manufacturers produced some 5,000 different items. Overall, about 500 manufacturing establishments operated at mid-decade and the vast majority of these (89 percent) employed less than 100 workers. Only nineteen firms employed at least 500 workers. As the local city directory boasted, “There is probably no city in the United States that has a more diversified line of industries.”8 Vocational education in Bridgeport took place at what was named the State Trade School, a state-funded, free vocational high school. As we will see, the history of the school, the largest of eleven trade schools in Connecticut, provides insight into changes in craft work and craft culture, the role of business, the aspirations of working-class students, and the changing ethnic composition of the industrial workforce. Additionally, Bridgeport is an interesting setting because the Socialist Party, led by union leader Jasper McLevy, dominated elected city government after 1933. The prominence of skilled workers in urban politics raised expectations that the working class could have a leading voice in local life as Socialists. I highlight the experience of the native-born children of the “New Immigrants,” a generation that came of age during the 1930s and dominated school attendance. In New England, this group totaled 38 percent of the population and exceeded 40 percent in such states as Connecticut and Rhode Island. Bridgeport’s second generation made up an impressive 45 percent of the city’s residents, and much of this group was under twentyfive.9 This “rising generation” had forsaken immigrant family advice and spurned the artisan world of their parents in favor of organized school instruction. The Bridgeport school was founded in 1910, a year after the Connecticut legislature became the nation’s first to subsidize free vocational high schools. Initially the school offered training in seven trades, but by the 1930s expanded its instruction to fifteen: auto-repair, auto-screw, carpentry, architectural drafting, dressmaking, electrical work, foundry work, machine trades, masonry, painting, paperhanging, wood pattern making, plumbing, composition and presswork printing, and welding.10 The expanding curriculum reflected national trends and was in keeping with vocational high schools growing popularity. Whereas 5 percent of high school age students attended trade schools nationwide in 1930, some 16 percent attended at the end of the decade.11 Student interest in Bridgeport created long waiting lists to attend throughout the 1930s. For example, in 1938 more than 450 young people were wait-listed and hundreds of others attended part-time evening classes, while about 730 students enrolled full time for two-to-four years of study.12 According to the Federal Writers’ Project in Connecticut,

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approximately two-thirds of the students at the State Trade School were the children of a wide range of eastern or southern European immigrants. The diversity of European backgrounds is striking, in many respects mirroring Bridgeport’s ethnic population as a whole. In 1938, the student body was 16 percent Italian-American, 13 percent Polish-American, 11 percent Slovak-American, 8 percent Russian/Ukrainian-American, 7 percent Hungarian American, and 2 percent Lithuanian-American.13 While old-stock American boys often dominated trade schools during the Progressive era, their representation declined during the interwar years. Between 1910 and 1920, students of Anglo-Saxon descent made up a significant 41 percent of Bridgeport graduates, even though this ethnic group comprised less than 15 percent of the city population. Their representation at the school fell dramatically thereafter. Between 1920 and 1930, it dropped to 20 percent of school graduates, but rose modestly to 24 percent for 1930 to 1937. Meanwhile, the Italian group in Bridgeport made the greatest attendance gains. Their proportion of graduates rose from 12 percent between 1910 and 1920, to 24 percent between 1920 and 1930, and leveled off at 18 percent between 1930 and 1937. The school perpetuated characteristics of white male dominance both culturally and physically—ethnic inclusiveness of the student body did not cross gender or race lines. Women were allowed to study only traditional women’s trades, such as dressmaking and millinery. Their classes were held in a separate building. This pattern of job restriction and sex segregation was common in vocational education in this period. The city’s black population was small—about 2 percent in 1930—and very few African Americans graduated between 1910 and 1937.14 And while there is no evidence of black or female protest in existing local sources, we do find evidence that male white ethnics often held anti-black views and believed that white women deserved only a secondary place in the paid labor force. In this sense, the school’s policy reflected contemporary biases. It is notable that for European immigrants at the bottom of the economy, anti-black attitudes often served to deflect the criticism they faced from the middle and upper classes.15 Scholars often note that vocational education has little bearing on one’s ability to secure employment in a skilled occupation. The argument goes that many trade school graduates are forced to find work outside the field of their training.16 Of course, the restricted labor market during the Depression heightened competition for jobs, but that fails to explain the influx of the second generation into the trade school. While large manufacturing firms in Bridgeport and throughout New England required new hires to secure a secondary education, examination of local evidence reveals the degree to which firms favored those with trade school experience.17 School officials and local government leaders

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adopted the position that vocational schooling provided a critical way for young workers to find skilled work. Certainly there appears to be truth to these claims, at least according to the surprisingly high placement statistics provided by several Connecticut schools. The Bridgeport school claimed that their placement of graduates in skilled work never fell below 85 percent during the 1930s. The Hartford Trade School boasted a 96 percent placement rate between 1930 and 1935. In nearby New Britain, trade school officials said that 95 percent of their graduates found skilled employment at mid-decade, and approximately 87 percent of all Connecticut high school trade graduates in 1938 reportedly secured skilled work.18 The second generation also turned to trade schools because, contrary to what is typically assumed, their own narratives suggest that immigrant parents played a diminishing role in their skills training and in the choice of an occupation. While much scholarship depicts the work lives of first and second-generation immigrants as interdependent as families relied on kin to learn skills and to pool wages,19 I find that both generations during the 1930s readily acknowledged that their work worlds were different and that the second generation needed to learn new trades independently from their parents. Immigrant parents granted their children such autonomy even though this weakened the strength of immigrant family culture. Interviews conducted by the Federal Writers’ Project in Connecticut reveal that the immigrant generation offered less resistance than we might suppose toward the second generation’s craft choices, and conversely, that the second generation did not expect to depend on their parents in learning craft work. Overall, the Connecticut Writers’ Project collected about 200 “life histories” based on extensive oral interviews. Known as the Ethnic Group Survey, it detailed immigrant life in four cities (Bridgeport, New Britain, Hartford, and New Haven). The life histories are an extraordinary source: significantly, both the interviewers and interviewees were drawn from the local community and record the views and beliefs or ordinary people which otherwise would be lost. As historian Laura Anker notes, “fieldworkers walked the streets of Connecticut neighborhoods, their own communities, knocking on doors and talking to people. . . . Since most of the interviewers were from the working or low middle classes, their contacts and networks were to immigrant working-class families.”20 A substantial portion of the interviews concerned working lives: the impact of machinery in industry; unions; networks used to secure employment; and the changing nature of craft work, including the role of vocational schools. In one case, a Polish-American worker explained that his mother deferred to his judgment in choosing a trade. The parent had selected the trade for her first son, but realized that her own judgment was inadequate

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when he later decided to work in a different occupation. As Frank Chop said, When we were growing older, we used to talk to my mother about what was best to learn. She said she didn’t know much about what the modern kids wanted to learn, so in other words she was willing to listen to what we had to say. We gave our ideas and she agreed with us that the best line is the mechanic line. She knows now that she made a mistake with my brother Stanley when she had him learn the carpenter trade, because now he’s working in the mechanic line and he likes it better.21

Henry Oleski, a twenty-four-year-old Polish American welder, said his friends picked out their own trades and “their families had nothing to say about it.” He emphasized the considerable autonomy of his generation. “In my experience of being with Polish people I find that the young are choosing their own trades. At one time the parents did the choosing for them. I think the reason is that the young people know what trades are better for a good future.”22 The experience of Slovak-American John D. further underscores changes in craft work and craft culture. He grew up in the mid-1920s and got his first job in a textile factory. “The first thing I did when I got out of [grammar] school was to get a job, any old job,” he said. “I work from the bottom up.” Schooling was not valued in his family because of the struggle for subsistence. “The only thing on the minds of the kids was to get out of school and go to work. The reason for that was that the parents figured the main thing was for the family to earn money and they didn’t waste time in having kids learn a trade.” His parents had a say in his work choices, which he said was the exception among his younger second-generation peers. “Once the Slovaks were trying to teach their children to learn on the Old Country style. That was the same with the trades and habits. But now the old people are taking a back seat and they’re letting the kids judge for themselves. I don’t think that the old people have much to say, and all my friends say the same thing.”23 A Polish resident, identified only as H.S., scorned his father’s bakery business to go to the trade school. “I didn’t like the bakery business, so my father let me go to the trade school and I took up machinist work. . . . The only thing which bothers my father is that there will be no one to take over the bakery when he retires or dies. He wanted one of us [four children] to be a baker, but none of us liked the business. He used to tell us that in the old country it was an honor to be a baker.” The conflict between father and son was commented on by an Italian mason, who emigrated from Italy in 1915 and saw few of the younger generation learning his trade. The use of concrete in place of stone rendered his trade less useful, C. Guerra told an interviewer. “Stone is cheaper like concrete, but they build from concrete just the same. That’s why people don’t care

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to learn trade like this no more. If they learn something, they don’t learn mason because there’s no chance for the mason.” New machinery also undercut his skill. “Before, mason make foundations by hands—now machine makes with one man what takes before 15 men.” As for the younger generation, “Kids now, in this country, be too fresh and don’t learn nothing. When they want to learn something, they go to the trade school and they don’t learn nothing from the masters.”24 Immigrant artisans often worked as cabinetmakers, blacksmiths, shoemakers, iron makers, barbers, tailors, stonecutters, and weavers—crafts they often practiced in the Old World. By contrast, their sons learned such new trades as plumbing, auto-repair, and electrical work. These were the most popular nonfactory trades at the Bridgeport school. From 1932 through 1935, 58 students graduated in auto-repair, 52 in electrical work, 36 in plumbing, 30 in carpentry, 7 in painting, and 13 in masonry. Fewer students studied such “old” trades as painting and carpentry because of the high level of unemployment in building construction during the Depression. In 1934, painters and carpenters formed the two largest urban unemployed groups in the nation. Building trades workers in Bridgeport made up 19 percent of those on relief, even though they were only 6.5 percent of the city’s gainful workers.25 And the young did not identify these new trades as ethnic enclaves. Instead, as John D. said, “The kids have learned to follow things along the American style. . . . It’s no use for the Italians to learn the shoemaker business and jobs like that because there’s no use in those trades anymore. . . . You find that Italian, Polish, Russian, Ukrainians and even the Irish take up the same trade.”26 That the trade school taught such new trades as plumbing, auto-repair and electrical work reflected the interwar expansion of the consumer and home markets. The widespread use of cars after 1920 among the upper and middle classes generated a demand for auto mechanics. The use of electricity and electrical devices necessitated more skilled workers trained as electricians. The need for plumbers reflects the increase in private bathrooms in American homes.27 Moreover, while many immigrant artisans were self-employed, the trade school encouraged the second generation to work on a wage-basis. This emphasis reflected changes in the labor market. The number of workers employed in “independent hand trades” declined by more than 50 percent between 1910 and 1930. Nationally, a mere 356,888 jobs still existed in 1930, and more than one-half were being done by women in the semi-skilled dressmaking and millinery trades. The independent handicraft worker was graying: their median age in 1930 was a high forty-five years. The Depression did not make the life of an independent artisan any easier, and few young workers tried to establish their own artisan business during the hard times. In 1934, the U. S. Office of Education reported: “So rapid and extensive are the changes

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in occupations and the corresponding changes in the equipment workers needed, that the procession of demands on them seems to be continually passing by while they stand still. . . . The only agency we know, which can help them keep up to date with the occupational equipment in skill and knowledge they need, is some form of vocational training.”28 Did students seek training in order to stay out of the factory? No such pattern occurred. Instead, they chose to study occupations that offered the best employment prospects in the local economy. Between 1930 and 1935 an equal number learned the nonfactory trades (plumbing, autorepair and electrical work) as skilled factory trades. After 1935 students responded to the need for skilled workers in the factories. A shortage of machinists was especially acute. “With factories everywhere expressing a demand for skilled workman,” the Bridgeport Post reported, “the machine shop at the school now boasts more students than any other department, and there still are 181 applicants on the waiting list. . . . Apparently, the prestige of the white collar is wilted and worn.”29 The case of the plumber reveals the shaping of a trade school craft elite. First, their wages were relatively high. The average Bridgeport plumber earned an hourly wage of $1.30 to $1.40 in 1938, more than three times the wage of the semiskilled factory operative and twice the wage of the skilled factory worker. The plumber’s training lasted from three to five years and the knowledge requirements increased as housing and sanitary codes became stricter. By the late 1930s only the very well-qualified were able to do the work. Codes and state standards became more demanding and new materials were used. “Sanitation and sewerage have grown to complex proportions and demand a technical knowledge which is very extensive.”30 Did the children of both skilled and nonskilled workers have access? Overall, the backgrounds of students and their choice of work training suggests that in important ways the working class reproduced itself. Many children of immigrant workers also became workers, although the types of jobs changed. My analysis of the family backgrounds of Bridgeport trade school graduates indicates that 73 percent of the fathers were skilled or low white-collar. Little difference is found in the background of students who studied factory instead of nonfactory trades. Skilled family backgrounds exceeded 85 percent among students in auto-repair and tool and die making. However, the children of nonskilled parents were evenly distributed with others in plumbing and machinist training.31 The emphasis of revisionist scholarship concerning business support for vocational schooling during the Progressive era cannot be discounted.32 When we turn to the 1930s, we also find that Bridgeport firms had close ties to the trade school and helped design the school curriculum. This relationship was widely acknowledged in the community. According to the

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Bridgeport Post, “State trade school graduates are acceptable to business and industry for many reasons, none the least of which is that the trade school courses have the approval of local businessmen and industrialists, and which, in many cases, have been specifically requested by them.” One might say the school provided organized apprenticeship under public supervision and control. Alfred V. Bodine, a leading Bridgeport industrialist and former head of the Chamber of Commerce, advocated trade school expansion in 1939, explaining, “I have employed many high school graduates. On the whole they are not suited for industrial work and they find it hard to orientate themselves.” However, trade school graduates “proved highly satisfactory” because they were better adjusted to industrial life.33 Even school hours and lessons were structured to resemble the regular work experience, with 90 percent of school time devoted to hands on, practiced trade instruction. Daytime instruction was for fifty weeks each year, and lasted eight hours on the weekdays and four hours on Saturday. The students were required to “punch the clock” daily to record attendance, accustoming them to factory procedures. The trade school schedule was much more demanding than the regular public school, which was typically in session for a twenty-five hour week. The regular public high school did not hold class on Saturday and their vacation allotment of eight weeks was significantly greater than the trade school’s two weeks.34 The school also taught business values by encouraging secondgeneration students to view craft work as an individual “career” and to pursue goals of individual “success.” John D. noticed that “kids are trained in the schools to pick out ahead of time what trades are best to follow and they read how this guy made a success or how that guy made a success.” In this, the schools used professional counselors who replaced parents as a source of vocational guidance. “Now they give you tests to find out what kind of work is best to take up. . . . Nowadays kids have their own ideas and they don’t mind what the parents say because they know that any advice that they need they could get from somebody in school.”35 Guidance counselors exemplify the intervention of American “experts” into working-class life. Counselors wielded considerable power, using standardized aptitude tests and subjective character analyses to judge an individual’s liabilities and assets, and to determine what they believed were the proper work choices for the students. If in theory vocational counseling was a democratic process of “self-guidance,” it is hard to imagine that it functioned in this manner in practice. “If there is any question in [the student’s] mind as to the career he plans to pursue,” the Bridgeport Post reported, “it is usually dissipated after he has been tested and interviewed by three vocational counselors, who ascertain his interests and ambitions, discuss his future with him and test his aptitude for

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the trade he has chosen. . . . By the time he is ready for class work, he usually has his future career quite definitely in mind.” Job counseling spread in regular public high schools as working-class attendance soared. In 1937, a survey of schools in 905 cities found that a majority (61.5 percent) employed part-time employment personnel, although only 2 percent employed full-time counselors. State employment offices also initiated vocational guidance programs. Connecticut officials “tested” approximately 5,255 young workers in 1939, including about 1,200 from Bridgeport.36 Management used vocational guidance to help reduce the level of labor turnover. Many feared that working-class job hopping and drifting would stir social unrest and pose a threat to the social order. In addition, when workers voluntarily quit or were discharged, employers lost whatever costs are incurred in hiring and training. Guidance ideology, with the stress on individual success and careers, echoed capitalist doctrine in an era in which bottom-up social movements had widespread popularity. Arguably, while business used the schools to train workers with specific skills and to wage an ideological battle, young workers were not passive recipients of business prerogatives. They attended because they had few other options, realizing that a regular secondary school diploma did not go very far in securing work in an industrial city during the Depression. Free trade schools provided an affordable alternative. There is no reason to assume that attending a trade school meant that workers shared the same values or goals as manufacturers. During the Depression, they used the schools as much as the schools used them. Indeed, the McLevy Administration encouraged vocational schooling by accommodating its expansion in new facilities as the decade closed. Socialist city officials spoke at graduation ceremonies and viewed the school as integral to industrial and civic progress. The school’s motto quoted Benjamin Franklin, “He that hath a trade hath an estate” and was popularly understood to mean, “A fellow with a trade is pretty sure of being able to land a job and hold it,” the Bridgeport Post reported. That Socialist City Clerk Fred Schwarzkopf served as vice-president of the school’s alumni association further nurtured these ideas among the city’s working class.37 Second-generation workers wanted jobs that were “interesting” to them. Mere survival, as a contributor to the family economy, was not satisfactory by itself. Yet, few thought they would become wealthy or work at a professional occupation; it is unusual to find such goals among working-class children in this period. Nor did many associate the idea of success with reaching middle-class status. Instead, being a success meant, for example, becoming a skilled auto mechanic with a thorough knowledge of the car business. A skilled factory job was equally as desirable. A machinist, for example, was valued because of his versatility, with the skill to assemble, install, operate, repair and maintain several types of machinery with the aid of drawings. A good job offered a steady income,

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a workplace that did not jeopardize one’s health, and provided ample means to save money to buy a home, a primary goal of many white ethnic families. “Why so many ‘white collars’?” the Bridgeport Adult Guidance Service asked in a 1939 pamphlet, What Shall I Be? They instructed young workers to pursue blue-collar jobs. “The earnings of many ‘white-collar’ workers are less than those wearing overalls and a work-shirt. . . . Many who have worked at both claim that of the two divisions of labor, manual labor is often more interesting and less monotonous.”38 The trade school was part of the changing working-class experience in Bridgeport. We have seen that students did not try to avoid factory labor and set themselves apart from the working-class majority. The school did not perpetuate an exclusive skilled strata. In addition, second-generation culture was a synthesis of many values—ethnic, multiethnic, and American. For example, the rising generation acquired ethnic values from their parents, who transplanted their culture from the Old World, and from immigrant institutions which persisted into the thirties in substantial ways. They acquired multiethnic values residing in the city’s diverse neighborhoods, which were populated by many different groups living side by side on the same blocks.39 They acquired American values in public school and from popular and mass commercial culture. Even the cultural idea of individual success was a contested construction: American teachers and guidance counselors taught one version; ethnic families taught another version. The broader working-class politics of the 1930s shaped by unions and radicals voiced yet another version. The Socialists in power emphasized collective goals, a coming together of working people. Yet, one could think in individual terms—my individual right to a job; my individual right to make a living wage—and still embrace collectivist social movements. This was possible in the 1930s, indeed, a defining characteristic of the decade. Certainly Bridgeport’s vocational schooling did not seem to steer workers away from a class-based identity. The school’s cosmopolitan character similarly encouraged young workers to look beyond the ethnic enclave, developing friendships and solidarity with other white ethnics, which later might promote cooperation in unions or in politics. Arguably, in the 1930s, at least, a trade school education did not deter union allegiances despite the business values taught. While one view holds that trade schools may become centers of anti-union sentiment, especially if privately owned,40 in this case union and left-wing politics were strong enough to provide an alternative. The McLevy Administration, dominated by skilled workers and promoting a class-based New Deal,41 offered a democratic representation of success for the working class. Widespread worker participation energized the traditionally disenfranchised. As urban politics became more inclusive and democratic, the second generation clamored for decent jobs, turning to vocational schooling which they learned on their own terms. Of course, there is a difference between trade union

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education which emphasizes the study of workplace inequities and injustice and the more narrowly focused skill-based training taught at the State Trade School. Nonetheless, we know that several graduates emerged as prominent leaders of the new industrial union during the early rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). For example, the president of Local 258 of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (UE), who served as the head of the CIO Industrial Union Council, graduated from the trade school in 1934.42 The participation of skilled factory workers in union struggles is widely recognized. As Steve Fraser writes, “In the auto and electrical industries, tool and die makers and machinists especially comprised the indispensable cadre of the new industrial unions, the UAW and the UE. If semiskilled operators comprised the CIO’s mass constituency, it was a certain kind of skilled worker, experienced politically as well as in trade union matters, who supplied the movement’s elan and organizational genius.”43 The unity across skill levels, which required a developed sense of solidarity among the skilled toward those below them, formed despite the individual ethos of careers and success. How this broad solidarity among the skilled was transformed in the post-WWII years, and the role of vocational schools in framing their outlook, requires further study. In short, when we look to the post-WWII period, what happened to the tradition of the radical skilled worker? By the time Congress passed the Vocational Education of Act of 1963, the system of vocational counseling and training emphasized career-minded behavior and development, including at the post-secondary level, to reach a broader population. The vocational reform movement had permanently changed the educational system with the widely adopted belief that schools should prepare young adults for jobs.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER 1) How does Greenberg consider the laborers’ perspective? What are the benefits of viewing education from this perspective?

2) What is the “Protestant work ethic” and how have students been inculcated with this ideal? Has it been effective? Did Catholic immigrant workers and their children embrace it in the same way as other Americans?

3) Can schools be used to create a vehicle for social control?

h

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IN THEIR WORDS: MAX WEBER Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2003): 17, 38–39, 181. The impulse to acquisition in the pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism. This impulse exists and has existed among waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists, prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders, gamblers, and beggars. One may say that it has been common to all sorts and conditions of men at all times and in all countries of the earth, wherever the objective possibility of it is or has been given. It should be taught in the kindergarten of cultural history that this naïve idea of capitalism must be given up once and for all. Unlimited greed for gain is not the least identical with capitalism, and is still less in its spirit. Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse. But capitalism is identical with the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit, by means of continuous, rational, capitalistic enterprise. For it must be so: in a wholly capitalistic order of society, an individual capitalistic enterprise which did not take advantage of its opportunities for profit-making would be doomed to extinction. . . . It is well known that the factory has taken its skilled labour to a large extent from young men in the handicrafts; but this is much more true of Protestant than of Catholic journeymen. Among journeymen, in other words, the Catholics show a stronger propensity to remain in their crafts, that is they more often become master craftsmen, whereas the Protestants are attracted to a larger extent into the factories in order to fill the upper ranks of skilled labour and administrative positions. The explanation of these cases is undoubtedly that the mental and spiritual peculiarities acquired from the environment, here the type of education favored by the religious atmosphere of the home community and the parental home, have determined the choice of occupation, and through it the professional career. . . . The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. . . . Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained

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an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.

h NOTES An earlier version of this chapter appeared in the Journal of Social History, 41 (Fall 2007): 149–161. 1. Melvin L. Barlow, History of Industrial Education in the United States (Peoria: CA. Bennett, 1967), pp. 119, 311. 2. As Daniel T. Rodgers and David B. Tyack have asked, “Who enrolled in the new vocational education courses? From what backgrounds did they come? What kinds of vocational courses did they seek out in greatest number? How much of that demand was voluntary, and how much of it coerced?” Rodgers and Tyack, “Work, Youth, and Schooling: Mapping Critical Research Areas,” in Harvey Kantor and Tyack, eds., Work, Youth, and Schooling: Historical Perspectives on Vocationalism in American Education (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), p. 284. 3. Mr. Voytek interview, box 18, Works Progress Administration, Federal Writers’ Project, Connecticut Ethnic Group Survey, at the Historical Manuscripts and Archives, University of Connecticut, Storrs. His son attended the local trade school. 4. Early writers viewed vocational schooling in this way. Charles Prosser and Charles Allen, Vocational Education in a Democracy (New York: Century Co., 1925) and Charles A. Bennett, A History of Manual and Industrial Education, 1870–1917 (Peoria: Manual Arts Press, 1937). 5. National Commission on Aid to Vocatiional Education, Vocational Education, June 1, 1914, p. 48. See also W. Carson Ryan, Vocational Guidance and the Schools, Bulletin no. 24 (Washington: U.S. Bureau of Education), pp. 38–58. 6. Paul Violas, The Training of an Urban Working Class: A History of Twentieth Century American Education (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1978); Joel Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972); David Nasaw, Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic books, 1976); David John Hogan, Class and Reform: School and Society in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). See also Harvey Kantor, “Work, Education and Vocational Reform: The Ideological Origins of Vocational Education, 1890–1920,” American Journal of Education, 94 (August 1986): 401–426. 7. See, for example, David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (New York: Knopf, 1967); Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Bruce Laurie, Artisans Into Workers: Labor in

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Nineteenth-Century America (New York: the Noonday Press, 1989); William Form, Divided We Stand: Working-Class Stratification in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), pp. 85–110; Jeffrey Haydu, Between Craft and Class: Skilled Workers and Factory Politics in the United States and Britain, 1890–1922 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Michael Kazin, Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987): Howard Kimeldorf, Battling for American Labor: Wobblies, Craft Workers, and the Making of the Union Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 8. Bridgeport Chamber of Commerce, The Book of Bridgeport, 1931, 44; Elsie Nicolas Dannenberg, The Story of Bridgeport (Bridgeport: Bridgeport Centennial Inc, 1936), 148–149; City Directory 1933, 10. 9. I discuss the second-generation experience at length in “Class Culture and Generational Change: Immigrant Families in Two Connecticut Industrial Cities During the 1930s,” Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York, 1990. 10. Connecticut State Board of Education, Trade Education in Connecticut (New Britain, 1915); Vocational Education in Connecticut, 1932–1937 Report, 28. 11. Alfred Kahler, Education for an Industrial Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948), p. 66. 12. The Bridgeport Post, Oct. 2, 1938, March 2, 1937 13. David Rodnick and Samuel Koenig, “Ethnic Factors in Connecticut Life: A Survey of Social, Economic and Cultural Characteristics of the Connecticut Population” (unpublished manuscript, 1938), chapter 6, after p. 3. Rodnick and Koenig directed the Federal Writers’ Project, Connecticut Ethnic Group Survey. 14. Koenig and Rodnick, “Ethnic Factors”; The Bridgeport Post, Sept. 26, 1930, Oct. 27, 1930; Trade Education in Connecticut; Marvin Lazerson and W. Norton Grubb, eds., American Education and Vocationalism: A Documentary History (New York: Teachers College Press, 1974), pp. 40–41, 114–115; Geraldine Joncich Clifford, “‘Marry, Stitch, Die, or Do Worse’: Educating Women for Work,” in Work, Youth, and Schooling, 240–242. See also Wendy Gambler, The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). 15. Greenberg, “Class Culture and Generational Change,” pp. 75–78; Bruce M. Stave and John F. Sutherland with Aldo Salerno, From the Old Country: An Oral History of European Migration to America (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994), pp. 221–232, 250; David Roediger, Toward the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 192–193. 16. See, for example, Work in America: Report of a Special Task Force to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973), pp. 138–141; and Grubb and Lazerson, Broken Promises: How Americans Fail Their Children (New York: Basic Books, 1982), p. 166. 17. Bridgeport Adult Guidance Service, Cultural and Educational Opportunities in Bridgeport (Bridgeport, 1939), pp. 35–45; Office of Education, Civilian Conservation Corps, Qualifications for Beginning Workers in New England Industry (Boston, 1936), p. 82.

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18. Connecticut State Employment Service, Youth in Search of Jobs! (Hartford, 1935), pp. 11–12; The Bridgeport Telegram, March 15, 1939; The Bridgeport Post, Oct. 2, 1938; and The New Britain Herald, Nov. 11, 1936. 19. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880–1920 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977); John Bodnar, Michael Weber, and Roger Simon, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh 1900–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Ewa Morawska, For Bread With Butter: The Life-Worlds of East Central Europeans in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1890–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Stephan Lassonde emphasizes second generation resistance to the family economy in Learning to Forget: Schooling and Family Life in New Haven’s Working Class, 1870–1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 20. Laura Anker, “Immigrant Voices from the Federal Writers Project: The Connecticut Ethnic Survey, 1937–1940,” in James Gilbert, Amy Gilman, Donald M. Scott, and Joan W. Scott, eds., The Mythmaking Frame of Mind: Social Imagination and American Culture (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing, 1993), pp. 272, 277. 21. Frank Chop interview, box 25, WPA. 22. Henry Oleski interview, box 25, WPA. 23. John D. interview, box 18, WPA. 24. Quoted in Stave and Sutherland, From the Old Country, pp. 62–63, 82–83. 25. The Bridgeport Post, June 27, 1932, June 30, 1933, Jan. 23, 1934, and June 25, 1935; Works Progress Administration, Urban Workers on Relief (Washington, 1936), pp. 36, 93, 124. 26. John D. interview. Emphasis added. 27. See, for example, James J. Fink, The Automobile Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988). By 1929, about 85 percent of nonfarm American homes were wired for electricity, up from only 8 percent in 1907, and by 1940 electric motors produced about 90 percent of total industrial horsepower, compared to only 55 percent in 1919. Richard B. DuBoff, “The Introduction of Electric Power in American Manufacturing,” Economic History Review (Dec. 1967): 515; John G. Clark, Energy and the Federal Government: Fossil Fuel Policies, 1900–1946 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 86. 28. Judith Smith finds that in 1915 almost one-fifth of immigrants in the Federal Hill Italian neighborhood in Providence were self-employed artisans but by the 1930s, “No longer were most children assuming occupations arranged for them by their parents.” Family Connections: A History of Italian and Jewish Immigrant Lives in Providence, Rhode Island, 1900–1940 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985), pp. 41–42, 66. U.S. Department of Interior, Office of Education, Vocational Education and Changing Conditions (Washington, 1934), p. 8. Statistics on independent trades are found in W. S. Woytinsky, Labor in the United States: Basic Statistics for Social Security (Washington: Social Science Research Council, 1939), pp. 73, 241, 256, 309. 29. The Bridgeport Post, Oct. 2, 1938. 30. Bridgeport Adult Guidance Service, The Plumber (Bridgeport, 1939), pp. 2–4. 31. Data covers graduates from 1932 through 1935, in four trades (plumbing, machinist, auto-repair and tool and die making). Fathers’ occupations are deter-

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mined from listings in the 1937 Bridgeport City Directory. The 1940 Census classification of skilled and nonskilled occupations, which places buffers and polishers in the nonskilled category. An additional note is in order about the difficulty of compiling these statistics. About 20 percent of the students (45 of 172) do not appear in the 1937 Directory. The names of an additional 13 percent (28 of 172) are unclear, usually because the Directory lists two individuals with the same name. So 99 students can be identified in the Directory. Of these, the occupations of their fathers is available in 48 percent (48 of 99) of the cases. All in all, then, we have data on about 20 percent (48 of 172) of the students. The Bridgeport Post, June 27, 1932, June 30, 1933, Jan. 23, 1934, and June 25, 1935; Margo Anderson Conk, The United States Census and Labor Force Change: A History of Occupational Statistics (Ann Arbor: UMI Press, 1980), pp. 39–40. 32. Kantor, “Work, Education and Vocational Reform,” pp. 404–408; Hogan, Class and Reform, 163–164; Nasaw, Schooled to Order, pp. 122–129, 149–154. 33. Alfred V. Bodine, quoted in The Bridgeport Telegram, March 15, 1939. 34. Vocational Education in Connecticut, 1932–1937 Report, 39; Kahler, Education for an Industrial Age, pp. 80–83; Connecticut Education Department, Connecticut State Trade Schools, (Hartford, 1941); The Bridgeport Post, July 7, 1935. See also Hogan, Class and Reform, p. 169. 35. John D. interview. 36. The Bridgeport Post, Oct. 2, 1938; Howard M. Bell, Matching Youth With Jobs: A Study of Occupational Adjustment (Washington: American Council on Education, 1940), p. 72; Connecticut Department of Labor and Factory Inspection, 1938–1940 Report, 121–122. See also Hogan, Class and Reform, 183–184; and Harvey Kantor, Learning to Earn: School, Work, and Vocational Reform in California, 1880–1930 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), pp. 146–166. 37. The Bridgeport Post, June 26, 1935, Jan. 17, 1936, June 23, 1937, and Oct. 2, 1938. 38. Bridgeport Adult Guidance Service, What Shall I Be? (Bridgeport, 1939), p. 6. 39. Block surveys reveal the multiethnic quality of several neighborhoods. As residents of many backgrounds lived in the same buildings, they became aware of cultural differences and told interviewers of the lack of conflict between groups. Greenberg, “Class Culture and Generational Change,” pp. 60–69. 40. See the discussion by Ira Katznelson and Margaret Weir, Schooling for All: Class, Race, and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (New York: Basic Books, 1985), pp. 150–177. In Detroit, the American Federation of Labor in the late 1920s waged a vigorous campaign against private trade schools, favoring instead trade instruction in public schools. Jeffrey Mirel, The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System: Detroit, 1907–1981 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 71. 41. Greenberg, “Class Culture and Generational Change”; Cecelia Bucki, Bridgeport’s Socialist New Deal, 1915–1936 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). 42. Greenberg, “Class Culture and Generational Change,” p. 223. The UE leaders included Henry Johnson, Andre Maye, John Doelling, and Fred Robertson. 43. Steve Fraser, “The ‘Labor Question,’” in Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 65.

8 ✛

The “Separate but Equal” Schools of Monongalia County, West Virginia’s Coal Mining Communities Connie Park Rice

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n 1872 the West Virginia Constitutional Convention wrote a constitution which established separate schools for blacks and whites, thereby becoming the first state to provide laws for “equal though separate” schools for African Americans.1 Many West Virginia historians, including Thomas Posey, an African American professor at West Virginia State College, have maintained that the state made a genuine attempt to provide equality in the schools. In addition, reports from the West Virginia Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics indicate that the state was providing educational opportunities for African Americans. David Alan Corbin in Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields claims that not only did the state pay more per black student ($111.47) than per white student ($100.63), but also that West Virginia did in fact succeed in providing equal education with the help of the coal companies that began operating in the southern coal fields in the 1890s. This was the result, he claims, of the coal operators’ belief that a literate work force would reduce accidents and increase production. According to Corbin, the industry was responsible for the “Golden Age of Negro education in West Virginia.”2 As historian Ronald L. Lewis and others have pointed out, in the Central Appalachian coal fields, which included southern West Virginia, coal operators attempted to create an ideal work force through the creation of a “judicious mixture” of white, black, and foreign miners. This does 165

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not mean that there was no ethnic or racial conflict, only that the groups received equal pay for equal work, similar housing, rental fees, and educational opportunities. However, Lewis argues that the state’s northern coal fields, including Monongalia County, followed the racial patterns established in the northern regions of the United States. In this region, the mining communities maintained policies of exclusion in which white miners refused to work with blacks and operators refused to hire them.3 Despite Monongalia County’s inclusion in the northern region, the same basis for equality that existed in southern West Virginia also existed in northern West Virginia. There was an absence of “Jim Crow” legislation in the state, and legally, the same educational existed. However, the patterns of exclusion that Lewis found in the northern coal fields limited opportunities for equal education. Students and teachers of segregated schools in the mining communities of Monongalia County maintain that the schools were separate but never “equal.” Their stories and county records both show that although West Virginia may have made a genuine attempt to establish equal schools legally and monetarily, in many ways, the schools in Monongalia County were not equal. Much of the inequality appears to have resulted from the absence of genuine interest on the part of school officials and a lack of knowledge and concern on the part of the white community. Comparisons of the county’s black and white schools in such areas as facilities, materials, curriculum discipline, teacher qualifications, teacher/student ratios, and supervision reveal significant differences. African American schools in Monongalia County’s rural communities developed following World War I when the nation’s increased need for coal led to the rapid rise of the local coal industry. With the ensuing demand for labor, Monongalia County experienced a large influx of population. In 1910, the county had 24,334 residents, with 1,173 located in Cass District along Scotts Run, and 2,495 residing in Grant District. Following the opening of the coal fields in these two districts, the population of the county grew to 33,618 residents by 1920, an increase of 38.2 percent. Population in Cass District rose to 3,160, and in Grant District, to 4,807.4 Among the miners were African Americans from Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina. In 1920, Monongalia County had an African American population of 638, comprising 1.9 percent of the population. Most were non-miners living in the city of Morgantown. By 1921, 269 African American coal miners lived in the county, and the number climbed to 965 by 1927. The total African American population in Monongalia County increased to 2,331 by 1930, representing 4.7 percent of the overall population, which had risen nearly 50 percent during the decade to 50,083.5 As the African American population grew in the mining communities, the local boards of education attempted to provide the “separate

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but equal” segregated school facilities required by the state constitution. Between 1921 and 1926, the district school boards established African American primary schools in five mining communities. Additional schools were established as new mines opened.6 The mining companies provided the land or buildings for most of the schools in the coal fields. Between 1921 and 1938, only two of the county’s eight African American schools had deeds to the property, while seven out of eight of the white schools in the same areas had deeds.7 According to the deeds, the land reverted back to the mining companies when it was no longer used as an educational facility. Most of the black school buildings were common dwelling houses located in the coal mining camps, whereas the majority of the white schools were prefabricated “portable buildings” constructed on a timber or stone foundation. The portable schools were one or two room wood frame structures covered by stained brown clapboard, with a “stoop” on the front of the building.8 All of the schools, black and white, had outdoor toilets. The availability of drinking water varied from school to school. In 1921, Mattie Smith, a teacher at the African American school in Everettville in Grant District, described the school as having “a zinc water bucket with no dipper.”9 Monon, the white school at Brady, had spring water piped into the building along with a sink and a pitcher pump, and several of the other white schools also had water containers with pump tops.10 When it came to materials, Dewey Fox, a black teacher at Chaplin in 1921, claimed that materials were “the same in all the schools . . . nobody had anything.”11 All of the buildings had Burnside stoves along with student and teacher desks. However, records indicate that the white schools had more and better instructional aids. In 1922, the white school at Stumptown had a slate blackboard, one hundred volumes of books, supplementary readers, a graphophone, and an organ. The white school on nearby Guston Run also listed a bookcase, seventy-five books, and an organ as part of its equipment. In contrast, the black school at Stumptown in the school year 1921–1922 had no equipment and was looking to the local board of education for support.12 Mattie Smith’s description of the equipment at Everettville in a 1921 report to the board of education reinforces this picture, indicating that the African American schools lacked sufficient equipment. She stated that the “furniture is rough” with “seats too high for the students,” and the “varnish gone or scratched off.” In addition, a few of the chairs were split and “all are unsightly.” Smith also described the blackboard as made of canvas and unsatisfactory.13 A few of the white teachers stated in the reports that the funds for equipment came from box socials and other fund-raisers. Roy Walker, the African American teacher at Stumptown, indicated in his 1921 report to the board that the black schools were forming parent-teacher associations

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and attempting to raise funds through box socials, hunting parties, spelling bees, and literary societies.14 However, black schools that had been supplied with the basic equipment still lacked additional instructional materials such as globes, maps, and supplementary books. Although the small amount of materials found in the black schools may indicate a lack of parental involvement, Dewey Fox stated that he had good participation from the parents in the schools where he taught, particularly at Everettville. Books had to be purchased by the parents from the county superintendent’s office located in Morgantown, and Fox recalled that very few parents did not save money for this purpose.15 However, if the district boards of education relied on the communities to provide additional materials, African American schools had a distinct disadvantage in sheer numbers. The small size of the community meant that there were fewer people to contribute to the funding of black schools, and so it took longer to raise the money for materials, particularly for large items such as organs or pianos. Although many of the black teachers in coal mining communities lacked educational tools, they were relatively free to decide what would be taught in the schools. Corbin’s assertion that “as long as the black teachers did not discuss labor affairs, they had complete control over their schools on the administrative level as well as in the classroom,” was corroborated by Dewey Fox.16 As well as the basic courses in reading, writing, and arithmetic, he taught courses on black history and black leaders such as Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. However, Fox indicated that the coal companies leased the school buildings to the board of education on the condition that the teachers maintain proper discipline.17 Such discipline was often difficult to maintain in an era of tense labormanagement relations. Strikes were rampant in the coal fields of Monongalia County throughout the 1920s. Fox recalled coal miners and their families, with all of their clothing and furniture, lining the roads along Scotts Run and Brady Hill after being evicted from their company homes. The constant shifts in the labor force between union and nonunion miners created a continuous flow of changes in the number and race of students attending schools, and disorder in the classrooms reflected the conflict in the coal fields. When Dewey Fox arrived in Scotts Run in 1921, most of the miners were wearing guns. The following year, the black schools were shut down for weeks while the coal company used the schools to house African American strikebreakers. Often, the children of strikebreakers arrived from areas that provided little or no education for African Americans, and therefore the students tended to be older. The situation in all of the schools was so bad between 1921 and 1924 that the county supervisor advised the teachers to use rubber hoses in disciplining the students in

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both the black and white schools.18 At the beginning of the 1924 school term, Dewey Fox began teaching at the Everettville School. Fox was a small man, barely five feet tall, and his class consisted of many large boys. It took him three months, numerous switchings, and a few fist fights to gain control of the school.19 During this period, the New England Fuel and Transportation Company imported large numbers of black strikebreakers. By 1925, 50 percent of the 550 men employed at its mines in Everettville and Lowesville were black, and the number of black students attending local schools also increased.20 In 1924, a black teacher from Jerome Park in Morgantown named Jessie Holland arrived at the Everettville School. Holland wanted to stay at Everettville during the week and take the train home to Morgantown on the weekends, but no one would give her a place to stay. Finally, the coal company provided her with a coal shed to live in during the week. She spent the summer cleaning the coal out of the shed and lining the walls with newspaper held by copper tacks. The parents of one of her students gave her a Burnside stove, and she stayed there on weekdays throughout the winter. Three weeks before the school year ended, a male student attacked and beat her as she walked along the railroad tracts to catch a train home for the weekend, and she never returned.21 Discipline was not the only problem. Most of the teachers who worked in the mining communities did not live in the communities where they taught and transportation to many of the schools was a major obstacle. Most commuted from their homes in Morgantown. When Dewey Fox was sent to the school at Brady in 1924, he had to ride a train from his home in Morgantown to Opekiska, approximately fifteen miles up the east side of the Monongahela River. A student met him there, and rowed him across the river where he walked across a hill to the school. Roxie Conway, a white teacher at Chaplin, rode a horse to school. In the winter, she traded schools with her husband who taught in a school closer to their home so that she did not have to travel so far. Often, the African American teachers were also the janitors at their schools. Fox recalled that in order to keep fuel for the Burnside stove in his school, every Friday he had to shovel two or three tons of coal into the school so that it would not be stolen by Monday morning.22 Although conditions in the early mining community schools required as much determination as education, it appears that most of the early black teachers were better educated than the white teachers. Teachers received certificates and salaries based on a state examination, and those who passed the highest level of the exam received a first grade certificate. Most of the white teachers in the county had obtained their certificates after graduating the eighth grade in local primary schools.23 In contrast, the state paid for many of the black teachers to be educated outside of

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West Virginia. African American teachers had attended normal schools (teaching colleges) and universities such as Delaware State College and Ohio State, Howard and Wilberforce universities. A few graduated from Storer College at Harpers Ferry.24 However, despite their advanced education, the teachers received the same pay as the white teachers based on the level of the certificate.25 Since West Virginia determined wages on the basis of the certificate, rather than color, the state paid higher salaries to African Americans than other southern states, a policy which attracted many quality black teachers. Often teachers, black and white, attended summer classes at West Virginia State College, Fairmont State College, or West Virginia University in order to upgrade their certificates. They also had the opportunity to attend graduate school in the evenings at West Virginia University. Dewey Fox attended geology classes during the summer with Professor I. C. White. These classes may have been held for African American teachers before West Virginia admitted the first known African American graduate student, W. O. Armstrong, in the fall of 1937.26 All of the teachers in Monongalia County experienced a rapid rise in the number of students as the mining industry expanded. In 1921, the African American school at Everettville had fifteen students. By 1929, the school had ninety-two students and two instructors. The school at Stumptown, or Pursglove, had an enrollment of sixteen in 1922 and sixty-five by 1929.27 The white schools in the mining communities had an average student/teacher ratio of 33.6 students per teacher, while the black schools had a ratio of 29.1. Although the ratio varied between 1921 and 1933, the student/teacher ratios within the white and black schools remained approximately equal.28 Despite the growing numbers of students, and although most of the teachers were young (between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four), there was little supervision from the local school boards or from the county superintendent. Black schools, in particular, suffered from a lack of supervision. In his interview, Dewey Fox stated that “there was never any such thing as equality in education . . . not then and not now. If not in other ways, there was always a lack of supervision.” Fox asserted that the supervisors rarely had the time to cover all their territory, and when they had to eliminate visits, it was always the black schools that were ignored.29 Fox’s statement is supported by other black educators. Joseph S. Price, in his report on black elementary school teachers in West Virginia, wrote that “the great mass of the teachers do not get training on the job under the eye of a competent supervisor.” Price stated that over 50 percent of the schools were not inspected regularly by supervisors; 38 percent of the schools were not visited once a month by the parents.

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Price claimed that as a result, many of the teachers lacked the stimulus to teach responsibly.30 The district supervisors’ lack of interest in the black schools may have been because, unlike white teachers who were hired by the districts, black teachers obtained their jobs through the county superintendent. Lack of supervision in the white schools was also a problem, although not to the degree apparent in the black schools. In addition to the lack of concern shown by the supervisors for the black school, the white community outside of the coal camps had little knowledge of the black schools or teachers. Some white teachers, who also commuted to the mining schools, were unaware of African American students or even the existence of black schools located in the same communities where they were teaching.31 Between 1921 and 1933, African American students in the coal mining communities who finished the eighth grade found it difficult to continue their education. Local districts did not provide transportation for students, black or white, who wanted to attend high school outside of their districts. The only African American high school in the county was located in Morgantown. To attend, students from the mining communities had to pay a yearly tuition of fifteen dollars to the Morgan District Board of Education and provide their own transportation. Therefore, many students found it difficult to obtain their high school diplomas.32 After the state adopted the County Unit System in 1933, students from the mining communities had transportation, however crude, into the city for high school education. Black students from Scotts Run arrived at the high school in Morgantown on a truck that had benches places along the bed and a canvas tarp strapped across the top to keep out the rain.33 After 1933, African American teachers in the coal mining communities began petitioning for a central black high school that would make higher education more available to black students throughout the county. In 1935, the WPA allotted $57,619 for the construction of a black six-year central high school, and on May 27, 1938, Eleanor Roosevelt dedicated the new school. The morning of the dedication, she visited Dewey Fox at the Everettville School. Fox stated that when he went outside, he was surprised to see Mrs. Roosevelt walking up from the playground with two little girls on each side. In the afternoon, all of the black schools in the county closed early and the students and teachers attended the dedication. Fox stated, “It was the highlight of my life.”34 Inadequate facilities remained a problem at many of the schools as can be seen in the requests and complaints to the county school board. In 1936, PTA members from Randall requested that the county install electric lights in the school. In April of 1938, the NAACP asked for the construction of a new school building at Everettville. Although a portable

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building had been installed next to the old school in the early thirties, the building was in poor condition. The board of education minutes show that two months later the board received a letter from the local NAACP regarding “certain requests which the Negroes of Monongalia County were asking concerning the school program as it affects their race.”35 In 1938, the county received WPA funds, matched by a local bond issue, to build and renovate schools throughout the area. The county spent approximately the same amount on black and white schools. Three new black primary schools were built, including a four-room school at Osage in Scotts Run and a two-room school at Everettville. Both schools were constructed of red brick and included indoor toilet facilities, a PTA kitchen, a large central hall, central heating, and folding doors between the rooms that allowed the rooms to be combined into an auditorium.36 The county consolidated all the black schools in the two mining districts into these two schools. The third black school built with WPA funds was located in Morgantown. All three schools operated from the fall of 1939 until Monongalia County desegregated its school system in 1954 following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. During this period, the African American population in Monongalia County followed a decline in the county’s coal industry. The number of blacks in Monongalia County in 1940 was 2,540, but by 1950 the population had decreased to 1,682.37 Enrollment in the black schools also dropped; by 1954 the Osage School had an enrollment of seventy-five and the Everettville School had an enrollment of only thirty students.38 Modern facilities did not solve all of the problems surrounding African American schools and students. The county attempted to create a standard curriculum in the schools, but did not achieve this goal. White instructors hired to provide music, art, and physical education in the primary schools often failed to attend to the African American schools. Officials attempted to bring vocational education into the schools, but it was of questionable usefulness. The African American high school lacked courses in typing, shorthand, and machine shop. It did offer agricultural education, even though a survey in 1941 revealed that 56.3 percent of the students came from coal camps and 39.5 percent came from homes in Morgantown. Any attempt at self-sustenance through agriculture was futile for the lack of land.39 When the white students received new textbooks, the old books were sent to the black schools, usually without covers. Many of the problems that the students experienced stemmed from the social exclusion practiced in Monongalia County. For example, when high school sports’ tournaments were held, local black families had to provide beds and meals

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for the visiting teams, cheerleaders, and parents. Although there were no official laws that prevented African Americans from patronizing local hotels and restaurants, de facto social segregation existed.40 When the schools integrated in 1954, several of the African American teachers failed to qualify for certification. African American teachers, who once had more education than white teachers, had now fallen behind educationally. Nine teachers from the black schools in Monongalia County were assigned positions in the schools following desegregation. Only three were from the mining schools at Everettville and Osage.41 As required by law, the early district boards of education in Monongalia County provided all schools, black and white, with facilities, and they paid all teachers, regardless of color, comparative salaries. However, the early African American schools were inferior to the white schools. Although the buildings furnished by the coal companies may have simply reflected the financial status of those companies, there were still differences between black and white schools donated by the same company. The fact that the boards obtained deeds to most of the white schools while they rented the black schools may have been due to the small number of blacks living in the county when the coalfields first opened. However, it also reflected the social status of blacks. Based on the region’s practice of social exclusion and the numbers of blacks imported as strikebreakers, the rental of black school facilities may have represented the county’s refusal to view African Americans as permanent members of society. At the same time, it is interesting to note the sense of optimism that the early African American miners in Monongalia County expressed. Roy Walker wrote in his report to the board of education in 1921 that “the history of the Negroes here [on Scotts Run] is in infancy. They are making the most of the things given to them and they will give everybody an example of Americanism.” Later, he added, “There is a great movement among the Negroes for upright living in the true sense of Americanism” and “in this section there are all types and races, [it is] ‘the melting pot’ of Monongalia County.”42 As the numbers of African American miners increased, the county constructed portable buildings similar to the white schools. Yet, the lack of supervision and interest shown by the district and county supervisors insured that the schools would remain inferior. Also, the small African American community had fewer combined resources that could be used to obtain additional instructional materials such as globes, pianos, or organs, even if parents contributed equally to the education of their children. And although it is true that the county paid teachers equally based on the level of their certificates, early black teachers in the mining communities with college degrees were receiving the same pay as many white teachers with eighth grade educations.

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When the WPA supplied funding for new schools in the late 1930s, the county provided equal facilities for the African American schools. However, board of education records indicate that the black schools received attention only due to the pressure applied by African American parents, educators, and leaders. While the coal mining communities themselves appeared to be integrated in many areas, the county itself was not. Consciously or unconsciously, the white community remained unaware of the African American community, and the social segregation practiced in the county insured that the black schools would never be “separate but equal.”

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER 1) Do you agree with Rice’s argument that “social segregation practiced in the county insured that the black schools would never be ‘separate but equal.’” Is there a cause and effect relationship between these two issues?

2) Based upon the board of education meeting minutes, what were the most pressing issues for whites? For African Americans?

3) For Rice, who were the agents of historical change? Compare your answer to Greenberg and Garrison’s perspectives. Why is this important to consider?

4) Were parents more interested in their children’s education in the 1920s than they are today? What kinds of sources are necessary to fully investigate this question?

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IN THEIR WORDS: AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDENTS IN WPA SCHOOLS Papers of the N.A.A.C.P., United States Library of Congress. Part 3: The Campaign for Educational Equality: Legal Department and Central Office Records, 1913–1950. Social-Economic Planning Council of Northern West Virginia 60 Beechurst Avenue Morgantown, West Va. August 16, 1935 Mr. Walter White National Association Advancement For Colored People Washington, D.C. Dear Mr. White, For the past eighteen months I have supervised a Work-Relief project for white collar workers. This project was identified in our county (Monongalia) as the Negro Rehabilitation Project. We have organized the Negroes in community groups, Negro 4-H clubs and we have begun the organization of boy and girl scouts. We are cooperating with government authorites in an attempt to plan and develop a Negro homestead for the coal miner of this section. We are also assisting local school authorities in securing WPA and private funds with which to build a centrally located high and graded school for the Negro youth of this county. It is especially in the interest of the high school project that I am writing this letter to you. Monongalia County has a population of 50,083 of which 2,331 are Negroes. Before the County Unit Plan of public schools administration was adopted in West Virginia the school affairs of this county were administrated by seven magisterial districts. They were Battelle, Cass, Clay, Clinton, Grant, Morgan and Union. One high school for white children was located in Battelle, two in Clay: Clinton, Grant and Union combined their resources and with the aid of the Rockefeller Interests builded a $300,000 “University High” School on the campus of West Virginia University. Morgan District builded a junior high and a million dollar senior high—all for white children. The oldest graded school in the United States was the Negro school on Beechurst Avenue, This City. Here Dr. Alexander L. Wade, a county school superintendent in the nineteenth century, taught the Negroes because there were no Negro teachers available at that time. He evolved a system of graded instruction there which, with numerous improvements, has spread

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over the Nation. Until six years ago the Negro graded school program remained in that building. Some sort of a high school program was attempted in an old building across the street which was originally used as an ice cream factory by a Negro business man. This latter building is the present location of my office. The Negro school was moved from this building into a private house, leased to the Board of Education by another Negro business man. This building has always been unsatisfactory—a fire hazard, unsafe, unsanitary and overcrowded. The owner finally became janitor and custodian and another condition was created which was highly unsatisfactory. There are no other high school facilities for Negro children in this county. This state has a constitutional tax-limitation amendment and other legal restrictions that prevent the Board of Education from borrowing funds for building purposes, while the tax-limitation amendment prevents a levy sufficiently high—under present conditions—to enable the Board to secure additional funds from additional funds from this source. May I hasten to state that the present Board and school officials are not the least responsible for the present state of affairs in relation to the schools. They inherited this setup from the old district boards, and they have been seeking a way out ever since they assumed responsibility for the school of this County. To this and, acting upon the suggestion of the county Superintendent of schools, I made contact with Hon. F. W. McCullough, Works Progress Administrator for West Virginia, Charleston, and Prof. Arthur D. Wright, President, The John F. Slater Fund, 726 Jackson Place, Washington, D.C., in an effort to interest them in our problem. Plans for the building were completed and submitted to the WPA at Charleston by the County Superintendent, acting as agent for the Board. Prof. Wright visited this city, conferred with the Board members and visited the site, as well as the old building where the school was housed the past six years. I am informed that he promised the Board assistance but it has not yet been verified in writing. The WPA promised to approve our projects (two out-right grants of $25,000 each), but they have not yet been approved and a month has elapsed since. The idea is to build a central school that will serve all the Negro children of this county from the sixth grade up, except perhaps one or two schools in the extreme southern end. Accordingly, a suitable location was a big problem. Our superintendent proposed the purchase of a beautiful tract of seven and one-half acres in the Westover Addition, a suburb. This was done at a cost of $5,000. We have planned for a landscape artist to supervise the preparation of the grounds so as to give us one of the most beautiful plants possible. But the citizens of Westover have protested the location of the school in their community. It is true, of course, that there are only thirteen Negro families living in this community which has a total population of 1,600, however most of us who live there are home owners. That is not the point—the point is that Westover is the geographical center of the Negro population of this County. It is the ideal location for a centrally located Negro school. As a property owner in Westover I, with a 100 percent representation of my fellow race citizens living there, met the protestants

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in a joint meeting with the mayor and council in an open air meeting a few evenings ago. We discussed the protest and I attempted to explain the plan to them. Every one was extremely cordial. The protestants are going ahead with their plans, however, to hinder the Board of Education in its efforts to build the school. Several times they have met the Board and on one occasion left a petition signed by 500 white citizens. It is generally conceded here that the cause of this protest is traceable, largely, to the efforts of the Negro business man who has profited for the past six years from the lease he has had with the Board. Earlier in the summer he is credited with blocking an effort by the Board to find a temporary site where conditions were decent. I am determined that the Negroes of this County shall not be discriminated against any longer in things educational and I am equally determined that we shall not be segregated. I am determined that those Negroes of the old school, the typical “stool pigeons” well known in this country, shall be driven to the wall so far as Monongalia County is concerned. In this I am supported by the vast majority of the Negroes of this and adjoining counties. 1997 rural Negroes are with me, and of the 334 Morgantown Negroes I have nearly half on my side. The Social-Economic Planning Council is a Negro organization in northern West Virginia with a membership of approximately 2,000. This organization has waged a firm but quiet fight for this school during the past four months. We are now ready to come out in the open and demonstrate if necessary. We want to know what you will do to help us win this fight for a Negro school here? [sic] If the protestants go to the courts we will need legal council [sic]. Can you help us there? Letters of endorsement to Mr. Floyd B. Cox, Superintendent of Schools of Monongalia County, Morgantown West Virginia, to Hon. Jennings Randolph, House of Delegates, Washington, to Prof. Arthur D. Wright, 726 Jackson Place, Washington, D.C. and to our own organization will help greatly because they will throw the weight of your commanding influence behind the advancement of the Negro in this county. Can you help us in this respect? Furthermore, letters to Dr. C. H. Ambler, Department of History, West Virginia University, Morgantown, W.Va. will help because he is the president of our Board of Education. Letters to Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the White House, and Hon. Harry L. Hopkins, WPA, Washington will help greatly because they are personally interested. This is especially true of Mrs. Roosevelt who has corresponded with Mr. Cox, Mr. Hopkins and this office in connection with this project. Can you help us here? Anxiously awaiting your reaction while we continue our fight for the right I am Yours truly, Dewey W. Fox, President

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Statement in Reference to the High School Situation in Monongalia, W.Va. I. Before the existence of the County Unit Plan in West Virginia, there were seven school districts in Monongalia County. These were similar to the magisterial districts as follows: Battelle, Cass, Clay, Clinton, Grant, Morgan, and Union. The secondary school facilities for white children was provided for by these several boards of education as follows: one high school plant in Battelle District, two in Clay, a junior high and a million dollar senior high in Morgan District while Clinton, Grant, and Union Districts joined with the Rockefeller Interests to provide a $300,000 “University High” school in Morgan District, on the campus of the West Virginia University, to serve their needs. Altogether these plants represent a total value of two million dollars, while West Virginia University adds another ten to twelve millions to the total equipment in this County for the education and training of white youth. II. The Negro school is classified as “C-Conditional.” It is the direct outgrowth of the old Negro graded school, formally located on Beechurst Avenue, which was the first graded school in the United States to be set up according to the present system. For the past six years this school has been housed in a private dwelling house which the Board of Education leased from a local Negro business man. It is overcrowded. It is condemned by local authorities as a fire trap. It is unsanitary, unsafe for children or adults to move about in, it cannot be put in proper shape and the Negro family still lives in this house actually occupying some classrooms in turns with the school children—bed pallets being made up on the teacher’s desks after school to accommodate members of the family. This high school plant, described above, serves the entire Negro population of Monongalia County. During the past term 500 pupils were enrolled in the Negro schools of this County. Approximately 150 were in the high school grades where they were crowded in the house described above along with the primary and intermediate grade pupils of Morgan District. There are approximately 400 preschool Negro children in this County while 86 percent of all Negro children (preschool and school age) are less than eighteen years of age. III. Our present school authorities had nothing to do with the situation outlined above. They inherited this system from the old magisterial districts. But they inherited more—they inherited financial obligations incurred by these boards of education, a tax-limitation amendment and a State Constitution so worded that it is utterly impossible to raise the necessary funds by special levy, bonds, transference from general school funds or by borrowing to launch a building program of any sort. Repeated attempts have been made to secure better temporary quarters, but without success. In these

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efforts both white and colored citizens have worked in cooperation with the Board. IV. Present plans call for the construction of a building on a serve and onehalf acre tract secured as an outright grant from the Works Programs Administration. The building will provide nine classrooms, boys and girls toilets, boys and girls showers, principal’s office, restrooms for lady teachers, library, storerooms, classrooms for domestic science, domestic art, furnace rooms, adequate hallways and a combined auditorium-gymnasium. The campus will include athletic field, playgrounds, driveway, walks and a spacious park. The location is central to the Negro population of this County, all of which will be served by this high school plant. The Negro population of Monongalia County is 2,331. Dewey W. Fox President, Social-Economic Planning Council of Northern West Virginia

h NOTES Previously published in the Journal of Appalachian Studies, v. 2, issue 2, Fall 1996 by Connie Park Rice. Copyright © 1996 Appalachian Studies Association. All rights reserved. Reproduction by permission. 1. John Rueben Sheeler, “The Negro in West Virginia Before 1900” (Ph.D. dissertation, West Virginia University, 1954), 219. 2. David Alan Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 70–71; Thomas E. Posey, The Negro Citizen of West Virginia (Institute, W.Va.: Press of West Virginia State College, 1934), 53; and State of West Virginia, Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics Biennial Reports 1951–1952 (Charleston, W.Va.: Jarrett Printing Co., 1952). 3. Ronald L. Lewis, Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict 1780–1980 (Lexington, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press, 1987), 109–110, 134, 148–149. 4. Earl L. Core, The Monongalia Story: A Bicentennial History, Vol. IV: Industrialization (Parsons, W.Va.: McClain Printing Co., 1982), 368, 486, 490; State of West Virginia, Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics Biennial Report 1921–1922 (Charleston, W.Va.: Jarrett Printing Co., 1928), 55; and State of West Virginia, Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics Biennial Report 1927–1928 (Charleston, W.Va.: Jarrett Printing Co., 1928), 16. 5. Earl L. Core, The Monongalia Story: A Bicentennial History, Vol. V: Sophistication (Parsons, W.Va.: McClain Printing Co., 1984), 38; State of West Virginia,

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Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics 1929–1930 (Charleston, W.Va.: Jarrett Printing Co. 1930), 9. 6. Lynn Hastings, “Monongalia County Schools,” vol. 1, 71, West Virginia and Regional History Collection, West Virginia University, Morgantown, W.Va. (hereafter known as WVRHC). 7. Ibid., vol. 1, 29–34. 8. Ibid., vol. 6, 58; Dewey Fox, interview with author, Fairmont, W.V., September 20, 1995; and Roxy Conway, interview with author, Morgantown, W.V., November 29, 1995. 9. Hastings, vol. 6, 58. 10. Ibid., vol. 6, 88; and Conway interview. 11. Fox interview. 12. Hastings, vol. 3, 77, 84. 13. Hastings, vol. 6, 58. 14. Hastings, vol. 3, 84. 15. Fox interview. 16. Corbin, 72. 17. Fox Interview. 18. Fox interview; Conway Interview. 19. Fox Interview. 20. State of West Virginia, Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics Biennial Report 1924–25 (Charleston, W.Va.: Jarrett Printing Co., 1925), 36. 21. Fox Interview. 22. Fox interview; Conway Interview. 23. Conway interview. 24. Fox interview. 25. West Virginia Department of Education, Educational Directory 1923–1924, (Charleston, W.Va.: Jarrett Printing Co., 1924), 98; Fox interview. 26. Fox interview; Monongalia County Schools. Minutes, January 4, 1936, 19, WVRHC. 27. Fox interview; Hastings, vol. 6, 58–59; West Virginia Department of Education, Educational Directory 1929–1930 (Charleston, W.Va.: Jarrett Printing Co., 1930), 111. 28. West Virginia Department of Education, Educational Directory 1929–1930, 87, 107. 29. Fox interview. 30. Joseph S. Price, The Negro Elementary School Teacher in West Virginia (Charleston, W.Va.: Jarrett Printing Co., 1924), 50–52. 31. Conway interview. 32. Monongalia County School Minutes, September 1929, 71. 33. Betty Pitts, interview with author, Morgantown, W.Va., August 30, 1995. 34. Fox interview; Hastings, vol. 10, 136. 35. Monongalia County School Minutes, June 1, 1938, 86. 36. Hastings, vol. 10, 136–137. 37. State of West Virginia, Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics 1939–1940 (Charleston, W.Va.: Jarrett Printing Co., 1940), 6; State of West Virginia, Bureau

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of Negro Welfare and Statistics 1949–1950 (Charleston, W.Va.: Jarrett Printing Co., 1950), 30. 38. West Virginia Department of Education, Educational Directory 1953–1954 (Charleston, W.Va.: Jarrett Printing Co., 1954), 145. 39. Pitts interview; Kenneth Burnett James, “What Vo-Ag Instruction Can Contribute to the Economic Self-Sustenance of Negro Families of Present and Prospective Pupils of Vocational Agriculture in Monongalia High School,” (Master’s thesis, West Virginia University, 1941), 7, 24. 40. Pitts interview; Charlene Marshall, interview with author, July 3, 1995. 41. Hastings, vol. 10, 133. 42. Ibid., vol. 3, 83–85.

9 ✛

Christian Day Schools and the Transformation of Conservative Evangelical Protestant Educational Activism, 1962–1990 Adam Laats

D

uane Gish faced a tough crowd. As one of only two scientific creationists representing his biblically inspired scientific beliefs to an audience of pro-evolution mainstream scientists, Gish complained that he and his colleague had not been given an adequate chance to present their scientific position. Gish acknowledged bitterly that he would “proceed to take one of the two seats on the back of the bus reserved for the creationists in this meeting.” Gish’s biting comment clearly expressed his opinion that he was being treated as a second-class citizen, just as African Americans and ethnic minorities had long been treated in American society. Other evangelical activists in the 1980s used similar language. Gerald R. Bergman, an academic who had been refused tenure at Bowling Green University due in part to his creationist beliefs, compared his situation implicitly to the contemporary struggles for religious minority recognition and gay rights. He complained angrily that he was a victim of “irrational” “religious discrimination.” Bergman argued that he was not alone, but that most “closet creationists” in the academic world “hope . . . they will be able to hide their creationist orientation or survive ‘out of the closet,’ often possible only in an openly Christian institution.”1 Like other conservative evangelical Protestant school activists in the late twentieth century, Gish and Bergman used the rhetoric of a beleaguered minority to make their cases. This marked a radical transformation in rhetorical strategy from earlier in the century for conservative 183

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Protestants. In the 1920s, populist spokesperson William Jennings Bryan confidently thundered that “the hand that writes the paycheck rules the school.” Bryan fought to ensure that his theologically conservative, Biblebased evangelical beliefs would continue to form the backbone of the explicit curriculum in most of America’s public schools. By the time Gish, Bergman, and other conservative evangelicals fought for a place at the public school curriculum table in the 1980s, their self-understanding had shifted from that of a politically powerful mainstream group sixty years earlier to one of a belligerent and beleaguered minority. They adopted the language of other minority civil-rights struggles in order to promote their conservative educational strategies.2 As historian Paula Fass has argued, many ethnic and cultural minorities have used public schooling as a way to move from the “outside in” to mainstream American culture. Not coincidentally, during the twentieth century conservative evangelical Protestants have felt their cultural control over public schooling steadily slip away. The increasing pluralism of American public schools has left many white evangelicals feeling marginalized. From assumptions of cultural hegemony at the beginning of the twentieth century, later generations of conservative evangelicals have found themselves forced to battle for inclusion in the spectrum of interest groups that determine American educational policy.3 In addition to fighting for inclusion in public schools, white evangelicals followed the well-worn path of other minority groups in another regard. As had other minority groups, they developed a separate network of schools from kindergarten through graduate school. This chapter will analyze the network of Christian day schools that proliferated in the late 1970s and early 1980s, encouraged by evangelical alienation from the culture of public schooling in America. As with many other cultural and ethnic minorities, care must be taken to avoid categorizing conservative evangelical Protestants as a single group. In the second half of the twentieth century, the term “evangelical” expanded to include a broad spectrum of Protestants who believed in the primacy of scripture and the importance of being “born again” through a personal conversion experience. This wide coalition included separatist fundamentalists in independent churches and parachurch organizations, as well as conservatives within such denominations as the Baptists and Presbyterians. It also included members of large Pentecostal and charismatic denominations such as the Assemblies of God, members of conservative denominations such as the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, as well as believers from a host of smaller conservative Protestant groups. Additionally, evangelical religion included members of many different ethnic groups, including both white and black Americans. However, the historical experience and cultural identity of African American evangeli-

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cals has been markedly separate from those of white evangelicals and has many distinct attributes.4 It makes little sense, for instance, to argue that black evangelicals felt transformed into a minority only in the late twentieth century. Even among white evangelicals— the focus of this chapter— ethnicity and tradition created significant distinctions. Furthermore, evangelicals of all backgrounds often disagreed vehemently with one another on issues of theology and political strategy. Thus, using the term “evangelical” to refer to this broad constituency is not meant to ignore these important differences, but only to reflect contemporary usage and self-conscious cultural identity.5 The reasons why this broad coalition of conservative evangelical Protestants made the switch to an explicit strategy of minority complaint date back at least to the fundamentalist-modernist controversies of the 1920s. During these cultural conflicts, conservative and liberal Protestants battled for control of denominations and schools. The fight that garnered the most public attention was the legal contest in July, 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee. In that famous Scopes “monkey” trial, fundamentalists and their conservative allies fought against mainstream scientific opinion to enforce a Tennessee law that banned the teaching of evolution as a fact. Fundamentalists won that trial, as they won many other educational battles in the 1920s. However, the cost was steep. Popular secular journalists such as H. L. Mencken and Walter Lippmann successfully promulgated an image of fundamentalists as ignorant rural reactionaries.6 Many fundamentalists retreated after such bruising public controversies to quietly build institutions and revise their public identity. With the birth of new- or neo-evangelicalism in the late 1940s, a wide coalition of fundamentalists and other conservative evangelical Protestants made an impressive comeback on the national cultural stage. This revival was personified in the electrifying campaigns of evangelist Billy Graham in the 1950s. However, a changing American society and culture soon dashed grandiose fundamentalist hopes that their 1940s–1950s revival could once again “win America.”7 Two of the most distressing warning signs to conservative evangelical Protestants about the shifting mainstream of American culture were two Supreme Court decisions of 1962 and 1963. In 1962’s Engel v. Vitale, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a state-written prayer could not be mandated for use in public schools. In 1963’s School District of Abington Township v. Schempp, the court ruled further that the Lord’s Prayer could not be used in public schools, nor could the Bible be read, which overturned a longstanding practice in public schools. Evangelicals reacted with alarm to the implications of these decisions. According to one poll, evangelical leaders considered the Schempp decision far and away the most significant and disturbing development in American society in 1963, outranking

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in importance even the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. William Culbertson, editor-in-chief of the leading evangelical periodical Moody Monthly, articulated the fears of many evangelicals when he warned of the “tragic consequences” that could befall American society as a result of this move along the “sorry road of unbelief.” Evangelicals repeatedly stressed the importance of these Supreme Court decisions as the leading factors in their desire for independent evangelical schools.8 Many nonevangelical observers attributed the desire for new schools to court decisions mandating school desegregation and busing. In spite of evangelical claims to the contrary, many private evangelical schools served as havens for parents seeking to avoid integration policies. Historian Joseph Crespino has noted that this dilemma over the nature of evangelical schools—were they “‘segregation academies,’ or were they merely ‘church schools?’”—became, for many observers, a defining aspect of the explosion in the numbers of evangelical schools in the 1970s. As we will see, the relationship between evangelical private schools and segregation is too complicated for a simple either/or definition. Although some conservative evangelicals made racial separation a bedrock principle of their theology, many others had long been staunch opponents of racism. Still others accepted racial integration as a social goal yet recoiled at the prospect of sending their children to schools across town. It is not accurate to call desegregation the main motivation for new private evangelical schools, but the racial integration of many public schools in the 1970s, especially including mandatory busing policies, certainly led some evangelical parents and students to question their relationship to the culture of public schooling.9 A host of other curricular shifts also fueled this evangelical fear that America’s public schools were becoming decidedly hostile to their core beliefs. One of the most influential changes was the introduction of biological evolution into many of America’s schools. Until 1960, due mostly to self-censorship by textbook publishers, only a minority of the students in American public schools were exposed to the ideas of materialistic human evolution. Beginning in 1960, after the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite spurred the federal government to improve science education, textbooks published by the federally funded Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) began to make inroads into many public school districts. These textbooks featured organic evolution as one of their key themes. By the end of the 1960s, nearly half of American high schools used BSCS materials to some extent. Equally important, other publishers rushed to update their treatment of evolution in order to compete with BSCS textbooks. As a result, many more public school students used textbooks that treated the subject of human evolution thoroughly and explicitly. Many evangelical parents reacted with alarm to these curricular changes.10

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In the later 1960s, many school districts adopted another controversial curriculum, inspired by the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). By 1968, according to one journalist’s estimate, roughly 50 percent of American elementary and secondary schools had begun formal sex education classes, and SIECUS became the symbol for all types of sex education. Many evangelical activists, including fundamentalist groups such as Billy James Hargis’ Christian Crusade and Carl McIntire’s Twentieth Century Reformation Hour, mounted vigorous public protests against the use of SIECUS’s curriculum. Billy James Hargis accused the SIECUS promoters of seeking to use sex education to “destroy the traditional moral fiber of America.” Even those evangelicals who admitted that the SIECUS materials did not encourage sex warned that SIECUS taught about sex from an “unbiblical, relativistic point of view.” Many parents took this as yet more proof that the public schools had become dangerous places to send their children.11 Another federally funded curriculum, Man: A Course of Study (MACOS), similarly raised evangelical hackles. By the end of 1974, the curriculum had been purchased by about 1700 schools in forty-seven states. By treating humans as one of the social animals to be studied, this social studies curriculum suggested, in the eyes of many critical evangelical activists, that humans were nothing more than animals. In their opinion, the MACOS curriculum taught children a destructive doctrine that negated the role of divinity in human existence.12 In addition to anxiety about sex education, evolution, and desegregation, many white evangelicals also felt that other minority groups had had more success in negotiating the increasingly pluralistic school system. As they came to accept their status as a beleaguered minority, many looked to the achievements of ethnic and cultural minority groups. Jerry Bergman, for instance, the evangelical academic who had been denied tenure for his creationist beliefs, explicitly compared the prejudice he faced to that of other minority groups. Some universities, Bergman claimed, asserted their right to fire faculty for discussing their religious beliefs with students. “But,” Bergman argued, “a similar case might be if a black were fired on the suspicion that he had ‘talked to students about being black,’ or a woman being fired for having ‘talked to students about women’s issues.’” Bergman and other activists hoped to establish an equivalent status with such newly recognized minority-group rights and cultural norms. Fundamentalist publisher and pundit John R. Rice used similar rhetoric. Rice had long been a leading voice in the separatist fundamentalist community. His Sword of the Lord publishing company and its weekly periodical had earned Rice a wide following. Rice lauded the successes of African American activists. However, he demanded similar rights for the new fundamentalist minority. “Why not have freedom in

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America as much for one minority as another?” Rice asked in 1965. “Why not observe the rights of Bible believers as well as the rights of the infidels in the churches and infidels in courts or schools?”13 This switch to the language and strategy of an oppressed minority was not without precedent among evangelicals. Throughout American history, evangelicals have fretted about their role vis-à-vis wider American society. From British colonial beginnings, American evangelicals have worked to achieve a society worthy of God’s special favor, even as they have worried about widespread Godlessness and sin.14 They have used the language of both majority control and minority persecution, often in almost the same breath. Historian George Marsden has called this unique construction the “establishment-or-outsider paradox” of fundamentalist culture.15 Evangelicals maintained this rhetorical tension throughout their educational campaigns of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Nevertheless, they had markedly changed the tenor of their public rhetoric and strategy since the controversies of the 1920s. Instead of battling to maintain explicit legal control over American public school curricula, they had instead retreated to build a separate network to cater to their minority beliefs. By the middle of the twentieth century, they had been pushed from the inside of mainstream public education to the margins. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, although they had not abandoned their fight for inclusion within a pluralistic public school system, they worked to make themselves an amenable independent school system free from the demands of public school politics. The burst of new Christian day schools began to attract attention beyond evangelical circles in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During the boom years, such schools were founded throughout the United States at an incredible pace. According to one journalist’s estimate, three new evangelical schools were opened every day in the United States throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. By 1975, approximately 400,000 students enrolled in evangelical K–12 schools. By 2002, that number had more than doubled, with over 800,000 students enrolled. Moreover, “conservative Christian” schools, including independent evangelical schools, had become, by 2002, the largest single category of private schools, with 5,527 schools. By way of comparison, there were 4,347 parochial Catholic schools in 2002, plus 2,933 diocesan Catholic schools, and 2,939 “Regular” nonsectarian private schools.16 Independent evangelical schools were not new in the 1970s. Several had been established in the 1920s and some conservative Protestant denominations had even longer histories. Conservative Lutherans and Christian Reformed denominations, especially, had administered fiercely independent school networks since the early 19th century. A few nonde-

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nominational evangelical K–12 schools—notably the Stony Brook School on Long Island and Bob Jones Academy—began in response to the fundamentalist-modernist controversies of the 1920s. Beginning in the 1920s, evangelical activists such as Mark Fakkema began to mobilize conservative evangelicals to build a nondenominational network of their own. By 1964, Fakkema’s National Association of Christian Schools, an affiliate of the neo-evangelical National Association of Evangelicals, claimed 215 member schools in thirty-nine states.17 In the immediate aftermath of the Schempp decision in 1963 there was a significant increase in the enrollment at independent evangelical schools. According to one estimate, between 1965 and 1975, the number of nonpublic, non-Catholic schools increased 134.4 percent. Given stable or slightly declining enrollments at Lutheran, Calvinist, and Adventist schools, this statistic suggests a steady increase in the number of nondenominational evangelical schools. More evidence of the early, gradual growth of Christian day schools in the mid- to late-1960s comes from the numbers of teachers participating in fundamentalist pedagogical workshops. For instance, an early meeting of the Southeast Christian School Convention in 1964 welcomed 325 teachers to discuss issues related to their independent fundamentalist schools. In 1974, that same organization’s meeting attracted over 3,000 participants. These numbers indicate that there was notable growth in the movement for independent evangelical schools long before the big burst of schools in the late 1970s.18 Indeed, many evangelical commentators noted the growth in the number of schools throughout the 1960s. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to ban the Bible and the Lord’s Prayer from public school, Kentucky Baptist pastor Ray Chamberlin rejoiced that there existed “In some communities across our land . . . Christian grade schools and Christian high schools. I’m speaking of those that are known to be true to the Bible, where the teachers are born-again believers. This is one great answer to a growing need.” However, Chamberlin worried about the fate of those fundamentalist children not lucky enough to live near one of these schools. Similarly, the editors of the neo-evangelical journal Christianity Today noted in early 1964 that independent evangelical schools were “only a minority of a minority—and a tiny one at that.” Nevertheless, the editors observed that the movement to found such schools was growing. The editors took solace in their perception that “One of the encouraging signs of our day is that American education, apart from the public school, is more ready to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ than it was twenty years ago.” In late 1965, fundamentalist John Reid Kennedy opined that America was on the verge of “the establishment of numerous Christian schools,” where the Supreme Court’s secularist tyranny could be safely ignored.19

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While the numbers of these schools grew steadily throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was not until the late 1970s that the numbers began to increase exponentially. The timing of this “boom” raises an important question. Given the push for evolution in textbooks beginning in 1960, the Supreme Court decisions of 1962 and 1963, the sex education and social studies curricula of the late 1960s, and the drive for school desegregation in the early 1970s, why did the burst of new schools not appear until the late 1970s and early 1980s? One possibility is that evangelical parents might not have experienced any direct effects of these changes until that time. This delay might be called the “Midway effect.” Political scientists Kenneth M. Dolbeare and Phillip E. Hammond studied the grassroots reaction to the Engel and Schempp decisions. Their study focused on five towns in the pseudonymous Midwestern state of “Midway.” They were shocked to discover that the Supreme Court decisions had no impact on school prayer and Bible reading in the public schools of those towns. Students continued to pray and read the Bible, and teachers, parents, and administrators continued to encourage and even mandate such behavior. Even more surprising, the utter evasion of the Court’s intent raised absolutely no controversy in any of the towns. Such a slow response to the 1962 and 1963 decisions may have been related to the reactions of evangelical students and their parents.20 Other analysts have suggested that race, not religion, was the real motivation for these new private schools. Journalist David Nevin, for instance, dismissed parent claims that they had been motivated primarily by the Supreme Court decisions of 1962 and 1963. Instead, he concluded that the real reason for the notable growth in Christian day schools, at least in the Southeast, was due to increasing pressure to desegregate the region’s public schools in the 1970s. Conservative political activist Paul Weyrich has suggested a similar interpretation. He asserted that conservative evangelicals did not care as much about “abortion, school prayer or the ERA” as they did about the federal government’s attempt to deny taxexempt status to Christian schools in 1978, based on the schools’ continuing segregationist policies.21 This impulse to put fears of racial integration at the heart of any burst in private schooling makes sense given the history of antidesegregation “white flight” academies. In the aftermath of 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling, many white southern politicians and educators closed down public schools and spent state money on white-only private schools.22 The large burst of new schools in the late 1970s has been interpreted as a direct result of later Supreme Court decisions, including 1968’s Green v. County School Board and 1971’s Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg. In those decisions, the Court ruled that school districts must act to integrate their students and that mandatory busing could be used to achieve this goal.

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These decisions, along with 1973’s Keyes v. Denver School District decision, expanded desegregation efforts out of the South to affect educational policy nationwide. The burst of new private evangelical schools occurred as cities across the country began to wrestle with court-mandated desegregation. It is difficult not to connect the two.23 In some cases, the opening of private evangelical schools resulted directly from court-ordered desegregation plans. In Adams County, Mississippi, for instance, sixteen of seventeen Baptist churches collaborated to set up a new Christian day school immediately after Mississippi implemented a mandatory busing policy. As one local pastor remembered, this school was explicitly part of the white Baptist community’s “violent reaction” to desegregation orders.24 Cities across the South reported similar experiences. In Memphis, for instance, a spate of new evangelical schools followed the city’s mandatory busing order. It strains credulity to assert that the motivation for such evangelical schools was not the specter of integrated schools and busing.25 Some evangelicals cemented the connection between evangelical education and segregationism by justifying continued racial segregation in religious terms. For instance, in the aftermath of the Brown decision in 1954, the Cameron Baptist Church in Cameron, South Carolina resolved, “In integrating the races in schools, we foster miscegenation, thereby changing God’s plan and destroying His handiwork.” For many evangelicals, racial separation was an important tenet of their belief system and integrated public schools meant both social and theological heresy.26 This religiously justified racial segregationism found an influential supporter in fundamentalist educational powerhouse Bob Jones University (BJU). BJU maintained a rigid theology of racial separation throughout the twentieth century. The university did not admit African American students until 1971, and banned interracial dating until 2002.27 In addition, some evangelical educators talked about their new private schools in the racially coded language common to the segregationist movement. To be fair, such usage was extremely rare, but it is possible to find examples of it. For instance, fundamentalist school advocate Jerry Combee warned his readers that “the public schools have grown into jungles.” The use of the racially loaded terms such as “jungles” served in some cases to play up fears of racial mixing without using explicitly racial language. In some cases, coded language about the dangers of disciplinary problems, drug use, and negative new peer groups influenced white evangelicals to flee public education. Even when racially loaded terms did not appear in evangelical rhetoric about new evangelical private schools, it makes sense to treat evangelical protestations of racial neutrality with a healthy skepticism. As Louis Lucas, the chief counsel for the plaintiffs in Memphis’ school desegregation suit put it, “The interest in God gener-

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ated by busing is phenomenal. It’s amazing how many people opposed to busing have their kids riding buses to private schools.” By emphasizing nonracial religious reasons for new public schools, evangelicals and other whites could disavow any racist raison d’être for their new schools. In some cases, as in Memphis, the timing of new evangelical schools coincided too exactly with desegregation orders to take such justifications at face value.28 Coded language and studied silences make it difficult to pin down simple explanations for the burst of new private evangelical schools. However, it seems evident that worries about the effects of racial integration and mandatory busing motivated many white evangelicals to open or attend new evangelical schools. As had Supreme Court decisions banning prayer and Bible reading, Court decisions mandating integration and busing pushed many white evangelicals to conclude that they had lost cultural control of public schools; they had been transformed into an educational minority. Nevertheless, it is not accurate to conclude that the new evangelical private schools came into existence solely to prevent racial integration. A closer look reveals a more complicated relationship to segregation, desegregation, and resegregation among evangelicals. In many cases, evangelicals publicly disavowed the biblicized segregationism of Bob Jones University and other southern evangelicals. In response to media attention to BJU’s segregationist policies, the fundamentalist faculty of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Baptist College in Lynchburg, Virginia proudly proclaimed its 6.7 percent African American enrollment. Other conservative Protestants disputed BJU’s racial interpretation of the Bible. Perhaps most significantly, the Southern Baptist Convention, which included large numbers of southern evangelicals, passed a strongly worded resolution in 1954 in favor of the Brown ruling. Although some Southern Baptists immediately dissented, the convention ruling received the support of the overwhelming majority of congregations. Although it is important to note that the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1950s tended to be much more socially and politically liberal than it would be in the 1980s, this congregational endorsement indicates at least some measure of Southern Baptist support for Brown.29 For many evangelicals, traditional concerns with biblical literacy trumped any concerns about racial integration. For example, in 1963, the Social Service Commission of the Baptist State Convention of South Carolina voiced its strong support for continued evangelical involvement in public education in the language of Biblical literacy: Every person should . . . be able to read the Scriptures for himself, and thus the ability to read the Bible becomes basic to the individual’s learning about God for himself. . . . Baptists in South Carolina have the greatest stake in

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the Public Schools, and the most to be lost if our present means of universal education is destroyed.30

This kind of sentiment is a far cry from a principled integrationist policy. But it serves to problematize the simple conclusion that evangelicals fled the public schools mainly due to fears of racial integration and busing. Some of the cities for which we have the most data further complicate the story. The situation in Louisville, for instance, seems at first to confirm the hypothesis of racial integration as a primary factor in the growth of private evangelical schools. After a 1974 court order cleared the way for an ambitious desegregation plan that included busing, enrollment at the city’s existing Catholic and secular private schools spiked. In addition, a crop of new evangelical schools immediately opened to serve white families who did not want to bus their children. One study found that most of the parents at these new evangelical schools identified desegregation as their primary reason for leaving the public schools. Another academic study of Louisville’s desegregation history, however, suggests some important qualifications. At two private evangelical schools that had existed for years before the 1974 court order, only one of sixty-eight fundamentalist families used the schools as a “haven” from busing. Although whites fled from public schools to a range of private schools, this indicates that at least some of the existing evangelical schools did not take advantage of the surge of white interest in private education.31 Another case study serves only to muddy the picture even further. A study of parents who switched their children from public schools to private evangelical schools during the 1982–1983 school year in southeastern Pennsylvania, including metropolitan Philadelphia, yielded complicated results. The perceived hostility of “moral values learned in the public schools” was far and away (84.4 percent) the leading reason respondents gave for switching their children. “Racial integration” fell at the very bottom of the list, with only 5.4 percent of parents listing it as the primary reason for their switch. On the other hand, high numbers of parent respondents cited “drug use” (68.8 percent), “discipline” (64.9 percent), and “peer companions” (60.0 percent), as important reasons for moving their children to evangelical schools. Such terms often served as code terms for fears of racial or social mixing. Interestingly, African American respondents were nearly statistically equal to those of white parents. That is, African American respondents also switched schools to avoid the negative moral values, perceived drug use, discipline problems, and unwelcome peer companions of public schools. One of the few racial differences in parental responses was that African American parents rated “racial integration” more highly than white parents in the city as their reason for switching to private evangelical schools. It seems African American

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parents switched their children into private evangelical schools, at least in some measure, not to avoid integration, but to avoid the continuing de facto racial segregation of the public schools. This may suggest that at least some Christian day schools in southeastern Pennsylvania offered a more racially integrated educational experience than largely segregated public schools.32 The regional proliferation of evangelical schools also stymies simplistic explanations of parent choice. If Christian day schools proliferated primarily as white havens from desegregating schools, one could reasonably expect a cluster of schools in the Southeast. After all, private schooling increased markedly in the Southeast after 1960, while the percentage of students attending private schools in the Northeast and Midwest declined dramatically due mostly to decreased attendance at Catholic schools in those regions.33 According to the regional spread of members of the fundamentalist American Association of Christian Schools (AACS), no such regional pattern occurred. A national directory of members of this association listed some southern states, such as Alabama and Florida, with high numbers of fundamentalist schools. But throughout the 1980s, Illinois had more fundamentalist schools than Georgia and Wisconsin had more than Mississippi. Notably in 1988, Pennsylvania had more than any state besides Florida, the birthplace of the AACS. (See figure 9.1). Granted, there were many evangelical schools in each region that did not join the more conservative AACS. But AACS members tended to include the most socially and politically conservative school communities. It seems logical to conclude that evangelical “desegregation academies” would have joined the association in large numbers.34 Much of the burst of private school attendance took place beyond the world of evangelical schools as in the case of Mississippi where, in 1968, 23,181 students attended private schools. After 1969’s Alexander v. Holmes Supreme Court decision, which ordered schools in formerly de jure segregated areas to desegregate “at once,” the number of students attending private schools in Mississippi leaped to 63,242. By 1980, that number declined to 50,116. But of those fifty thousand privately educated students in Mississippi, only a small fraction seems to have attended AACS fundamentalist schools. By 1982, Mississippi had only eight such schools. Furthermore, in Illinois, a leading state in absolute numbers of fundamentalist schools, two-thirds of the African American and Latino student population attended public schools in the city of Chicago in the early 1980s. In contrast, only one-sixteenth of Illinois’ white students attended Chicago city public schools in the same time period. If fears of racial mixing and desegregation were primary factors in opening or attending evangelical private schools, we would expect to see a cluster of such schools in the Chicago area. Instead, among members of the AACS, we

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Figure 9.1. Number of member schools in the American Association of Christian Schools, by state. State Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire

1982

1988

State

1982

1988

72 8 9 15 12 26 7 9 83 8 1 2 69 34 25 18 3 2 17 30 13 19 29 8 9 2 2 1 2

38 3 7 14 20 15 7 7 206 49 3 1 55 25 15 13 6 5 9 30 14 42 24 5 23 0 2 0 8

New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming Puerto Rico Canada Saipan West Germany

20 2 52 5 0 7 3 4 65 0 54 1 65 61 1 12 37 2 11 36 9 3 1 0 0

17 0 41 24 1 40 1 1 72 1 54 0 55 24 2 11 62 1 25 30 4 1 0 1 2

Sources: Directory of the American Association of Christian Schools (Normal, IL: American Association of Christian Schools, 1982 & 1988).

find only two schools in Chicago proper, the same number as the much smaller downstate city of Springfield. By way of comparison, in Rockford, Illinois, eighty miles west of Chicago, five such schools operated in 1982. It seems nondenominational independent evangelical schools found much of their success in regions of relatively limited ethnic minority public school attendance.35 Indeed, some cities witnessed a notable growth in “Black Christian Academies.” These schools were private evangelical schools that served an exclusively African American student body. In the 1980s, at least 200 of these schools opened in large cities, including a dozen each in Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Washington DC, as well as six in Jackson, Mississippi

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and more than thirty in Los Angeles. Though entirely racially segregated, these schools demonstrated that the impulse to open private evangelical schools was not a whites-only affair.36 An additional complicating factor is the question of timing. If fears of desegregation and busing were the main reason for the founding of a network of Christian day schools, we would expect it to follow the regional pattern of desegregation controversy. That is, from 1955 to 1971, when states in the Southeast that had practiced de jure school segregation came under increasing pressure to integrate, we would expect many new evangelical schools in that region. After 1973’s Keyes decision by the Supreme Court, when northern and western cities came under increasing desegregation pressure, we should expect Christian day schools to proliferate in those areas. Instead, we see a steady trickle of new schools in all regions throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. Only in the late 1970s did such schools begin to proliferate nationwide. The burst in schools was not limited to any region, nor was there a noticeable difference in the timing of the boom of evangelical schools by region. Another statistic that precludes generalizations about a primarily racial motivation for new Christian schools is that the largest recipient of white students fleeing from desegregation was not private evangelical schools but rather the booming suburban public high schools of the 1970s and 1980s. Contrary to popular impressions, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the numbers of students attending private schools nationwide dropped from 13.6 percent in 1960 to 9.8 percent in 1990.37 Meanwhile, the proportion of white students attending public elementary and high schools nationwide increased markedly. Those students, however, had moved mainly into suburban public schools. For instance, the suburban schools surrounding Atlanta served ninety-eight percent of the area’s white students in 1986.38 It is a complicated picture. In some cities, such as Memphis and Louisville, desegregation provided the catalyst to push many white evangelicals out of public schooling. It is important to note, however, that in the Louisville example at least, the evangelical schools resulting from the desegregation crisis differed from public schools in more ways than racial integration. The new schools also emphasized prayer and evangelical theology. They did not teach evolution as true science, and many employed conservative pedagogy instead of following public school curricular trends such as the “new math” and “whole language.”39 In these cases, desegregation acted to convince large numbers of evangelical parents that the public schools had become hostile environments for their children, but the source of that new expression of minority victimization was not simply racial integration or mandatory busing. Assuming that all such schools served mainly to serve as segregation academies, as some

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analysts have done, fundamentally misinterprets the more complex motivation for this burst of new schools.40 In the end, the issue of racial desegregation still does not satisfactorily answer the question of timing. For most evangelicals, the 1960s and 1970s included a demoralizing series of changes that forced them to revolutionize their understanding of their cultural role in America’s public schools: the federal government funded a series of evolution-heavy textbooks, the Supreme Court banned prayer and Bible-reading from public schools, sex education became a part of the standard curriculum, and racial desegregation and busing became potentially mandatory parts of public schooling. All of these events pushed evangelicals to transform their understanding of their role in public schools to that of a beleaguered minority. Yet although these events occurred throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, it was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that the numbers of private nondenominational evangelical schools grew exponentially. It took years for the movement to build up enough momentum to fuel the three-schools-a-day growth of the late 1970s. One unexplored reason for this delay is the prosaic reason of institutional support lag. In order to support such rapid growth, evangelical educators needed a network of support services. In spite of earnest evangelical efforts in earlier years, that network did not reach maturity until the end of the 1970s. The institutional apparatus of the movement grew steadily but relatively slowly. For instance, one of the leading providers of fundamentalist curricula for Christian day schools had its beginnings in the early 1950s. In 1954, Arlin and Beka Horton opened Pensacola Christian Academy in Pensacola, Florida. The Hortons gradually developed a library of teaching materials to fit their educational philosophy. They looked for books that emphasized fundamental, Bible-based evangelical theology, as well as traditional, teacher-directed, rote-memorizationcentered pedagogy. As they developed their school curriculum, they found a shortage of traditional textbooks. Such titles had long gone out of print and were impossible or very expensive to acquire. To remedy the problem, in 1972 they purchased copyrights and begin republishing older textbooks. They noted a great demand for these traditional textbooks and they began marketing them as A Beka Book Publications (A Beka). It was not until 1976 that they had assembled a full catalog of traditional, fundamentalist curricular materials and offered them for sale to all those interested in starting a Christian day school. Also, only by the late 1970s had A Beka begun a nationwide series of one-day workshops to encourage conservative evangelicals to open their own schools. These workshops, plus the availability of suitable curricular materials, encouraged interested evangelicals to start schools of their own. Those same evangelical educators may have been interested in opening their own

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schools earlier, but most could not do so until such institutional support became available.41 Other curricular options also took several years to prepare. One of the most popular curriculum choices for the thousands of Christian day schools that sprouted up in the late 1970s and early 1980s was that of Accelerated Christian Education (ACE). Donald Howard did not begin experimenting with this student-paced curriculum until 1970. He had been motivated in part by his discovery of notably different learning styles in his own four children. In 1971 he tested the approach at eight pilot schools in which students sat in individual cubicles and each student worked at his or her own pace on a series of workbooks. A teacher or aide administered tests when a student had completed the required work at a certain level. The relative low cost of the ACE approach allowed many churches and parent groups with limited funds to consider starting a Christian day school in the late 1970s. As with the availability of the A Beka curriculum by the late 1970s, the ACE curriculum fed directly into the burst of new schools in the late 1970s. By 1973, 330 schools used the ACE curriculum and by 1977 that number had expanded to almost 2,000 schools. As had the Hortons, in the late 1970s and early 1980s Donald Howard and other ACE leaders actively promoted the opportunities made available by the ACE approach. For instance, in addition to speeches and workshops across the country, ACE leaders approached evangelical pastors in the late 1970s and early 1980s with glossy, chart-laden promotional materials, promising “You Can Have a Christian School: We’ll Show You How!” The energetic promotion of such convenient and culturally appropriate evangelical curricula convinced many evangelical parents and pastors to open their own independent schools.42 The third major publisher of curricular materials for Christian day schools also took several years to feed the boom of the late 1970s. It was not until 1974 that two faculty members at fundamentalist Bob Jones University decided the growing Christian day school movement needed new fundamentalist textbooks. Their first book, Physical Science for Christian Schools, began the school publishing work of the Bob Jones University Press. Unlike the curricular materials from A Beka, Bob Jones University Press materials emphasized the role of trained Christian teachers and administrators in operating a Christian day school. They promoted their line of textbooks as an evangelical alternative to reprinted traditional textbooks. As Bob Jones University faculty members added more titles annually to the Press catalog, those evangelicals interested in opening a new school had additional curricular materials on which to rely. It was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, that the BJU materials offered a more complete curricular list.43

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In addition to the slow development of curricular materials, network support organizations for Christian day schools took several years to come together. Once these national networks were in place, they offered a great deal of practical support to thousands of new Christian schools. As with the producers of Christian curriculum, the organizers of networks began their work with Christian day schools long before the boom years of the late 1970s. In 1960, for instance, Alek Janney opened Dade Christian School in Miami and, in 1967, he organized the Florida Association of Christian Schools. By 1972, he expanded his Florida organization nationwide into the fundamentalist American Association of Christian Schools (AACS). It was not until 1977, however, that Janney began work as a full-time traveling Christian school consultant and promoter. By 1986 the AACS included over 1,100 schools in its network. These schools relied on many of the essential services AACS provided, including insurance, student athletic leagues, and teacher and administrator training. Without the support of such a body, it would have been much more difficult for so many Christian schools to open quickly. As with the slow development of curricular materials, this institutional support was not available until the late 1970s.44 Another national organization also contributed to the boom in new schools. It was not until 1978 that several regional organizations combined to form the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI). As did the AACS, ACSI offered important services for start-up Christian schools, including school accreditation, teacher certification, and teacher training. Other school networks also helped. For schools affiliated with the Christian Reformed denomination, for instance, the Christian Schools International organization (CSI) provided services similar to those offered by AACS and ACSI.45 Each of these national organizations fueled school growth by servicing different clienteles. The AACS had a more fundamentalist, separatist bent. The ACSI was more ecumenical in nature, welcoming charismatic and new-evangelical schools into its ranks. Organizations such as CSI provided services for schools of a particular denomination.46 Furthermore, the idea of a Christian school came to seem less exotic as the numbers of Christian schools increased. In the early 1960s, many Christian school promoters had to work hard to convince parents that a Christian school was not a radical or impossible dream. In 1964, for instance, John F. Blanchard, Jr., a school promoter with the National Association of Christian Schools, told parents, “Yes, you can have a Christian school!” At that relatively early date, many evangelical parents considered the idea novel and untested. By the late 1970s, however, Christian schools had become so ubiquitous they no longer seemed to suggest

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a radical or novel alternative, but rather a respectable and traditional educational choice. For instance, by the late 1970s, national organizations such as the AACS offered a wide spectrum of services traditionally available at large public high schools, such as its own national honor society. The availability of such services made the idea of a Christian school much less intimidating and radical to parents. As many more of them decided to send their children to relatively stable, mature Christian schools in the late 1970s, enrollment numbers suddenly shot up.47 All of these institutional factors help explain the delayed timing of the enrollment explosion and increase in the number of private evangelical schools in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Certainly, fears of desegregation and busing likely played a leading role in the founding of some schools, but the popularity of the movement cannot be explained as simply a racial affair. The desire to open new schools can best be seen as a growing response to a series of social and cultural changes. By the late 1970s, many evangelicals recognized that they had lost control of public schools. Banning prayer, welcoming sex education and evolution, and forcing desegregation and busing all struck evangelical parents as a series of affronts. Together, these curricular and social changes convinced many evangelicals that they could no longer entrust their children to America’s public schools. By the late 1970s, the movement to open independent schools had achieved an institutional momentum of its own. Only by that relatively late date did many evangelical parents have a convenient alternative to public schools and they chose to send their children to those culturally and theologically amenable schools by the hundreds of thousands. Although they often removed their children from public schools, white evangelicals had not abandoned them entirely. Even some families who had their own children in independent Christian day schools continued to work to “reclaim” public schools. Some evangelical activists fought with local and state educational authorities in order to influence public school curricula. They fought for inclusion of “scientific creationism” alongside evolutionary theory. They battled against sex education in the schools. They pushed politicians to amend the Constitution to allow prayer and Bible-reading back into public schools. They also worked to secure their rights to evangelize students within public schools.48 The most noticeable evangelical activism, however, remained the burst of new Christian day schools. The proliferation of these schools in the late 1970s and early 1980s added a significant new institutional element to the landscape of American education. By the 1970s, evangelical educational activists no longer felt that the state could provide an education that was appropriate for their children. Mimicking the long struggles of other ethnic and cultural minority groups, evangelicals struggled to build an amenable school system to inculcate their beliefs and focus on essential

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knowledge. The remarkable success of that network cannot be reduced to the single issue of “white flight,” although that played a significant part. Instead, as had other minority groups, many evangelicals reacted to a potent mix of factors that forced them out of America’s public schools. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER 1) According to Laats’s analysis, what new educational strategies have conservative evangelicals adopted?

2) In the “Sword of the Lord” excerpt provided, what factors caused evangelicals to feel pushed out of public schools?

3) What are the current arguments regarding evolutionism vs. creationism in education?

4) When we examine the history of American education, what factors determine the changes we see over time? Is religion the deciding factor?

h IN THEIR WORDS: PRAYER AND BIBLE IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS Ray Chamberlin, “Prayer and Bible in Public Schools,” Sword of the Lord 30 (17 January 1964): 1, 12. Used with permission. Prayer and Bible in Public Schools (Delivered Sunday morning, September 8, 1963, at the Faith Baptist Church, Cynthiana, Kentucky, by the pastor). Rev. Ray Chamberlin “them that honour me I will honour . . . “ —I Sam. 2:30 “The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God.” —Ps. 9:17.

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“Hath a nation changed their gods, which are yet no gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which doth not profit.” —Jer. 2:11. The United States of America, freedom’s last stronghold on earth, has too much parted ways with God. In her forgetfulness of God she shall be turned into Hell unless she repents! The Pilgrims came here for freedom of worship. In the Declaration of Independence we find the name of “God,” “Creator,” and “Divine Providence.” The first English Bible printed in America (Philadelphia, 1782) was approved and recommended by the United States Congress. George Washington, inaugurated as the first President of the United States in 1789 said, “It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.” The first amendment to the Constitution (1791) declares in part, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. . . .” Daniel Webster wrote to his pastor in 1807: “I believe Jesus Christ to be the Son of God. I believe there is no other way of salvation than through the merits of His atonement. I believe that the Bible is to be understood and received. . . . “ Andrew Jackson, inaugurated as President in 1829, declared of the Bible, “That book, sir, is the rock on which our republic rests.” In our National Anthem we sing, “And this be our motto, in God is our trust.” Our coins have declared, “IN GOD WE TRUST.” Our postage stamps have declared, “IN GOD WE TRUST.” Since the earliest days of our educational system in one-room log cabins, the Bible has been read and prayer has been made to the God of the Bible. Millions have believed with Alfred Lord Tennyson that, “Bible reading is an education in itself.” Many states, including our own Kentucky, enacted laws requiring Bible reading in public schools. Americans believed by and large that Patrick Henry, that patriot and lover of liberty was right when he said, “The Bible is worth all other books which have ever been printed.” God promised in I Samuel 2:30, “. . . them that honour me I will honour.” Little wonder in the light of such a promise and such a people that we have risen in such a few years to be the No. 1 nation of the earth! Now America has insulted the Bible, God Almighty, and we shall see darker days ahead unless there is great repentance!

Is the Bible a Sectarian Book? In 1955, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review a New Jersey Supreme Court’s decision banning the distribution of Bibles in that state’s public

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schools. New Jersey’s Supreme Court had ruled that the Gideon Bible, a King James Version, was a “SECTARIAN BOOK.” Refusal of the U.S. Supreme Court implied that they were in accord with that decision. Please understand that the issue is not separation of church and state. The real issue is separation of Bible and state, ultimately, separation of God and state! Then on the dark day of June 17, 1963, the United States Supreme Court reached a decision that a certain written prayer in New York Schools was not to be allowed. Some sincere people reckoned that such a decision would never affect us. Others seemed to think it was a victory for freedom. I must agree with Senator Strom Thurmond who said, “It was a victory of sorts for freedom, but a victory for freedom from religion rather than freedom of religion.” Though Patrick Henry had rightly declared, “The Bible is worth all other books which have ever been printed,” many say it can no longer be read with reverence in our schools to our children! Though more space is given it in prominent encyclopedias than any other book ever written, many say the Bible cannot be read with reverence in public schools! Though its truth has given peace, guidance and strength to tens of millions, the highest court in America has discouraged certain specified prayers. Other courts have forbidden Bible reading.

By Doing Nothing We are Agreeing Queen Victoria once said of the Bible, “That book accounts for the supremacy of England.” Our own great Horace Greeley said, “It is impossible to enslave mentally or socially a Bible reading people. The principles of the Bible are the groundwork of human freedom.” It could be said of our mistaken leaders, “the word of the Lord is unto them a reproach; they have no delight in it” (Jer. 6:10). To impose upon our little ones their reproach for the Word of God (and the God of the Word) by depriving them of the reverent reading of it daily at school will surely weaken our society and give entrance for all sorts of false philosophy, including communism which is so cleverly woven into many textbooks. The action of the Supreme Court makes some of us wonder if the judges are, perhaps without knowledge of it, making decisions that will lead to our destruction. For us to do nothing and say nothing at such a time would be wrong.

Something Can Be Done In some communities across our land there are Christian grade schools and Christian high schools. I’m speaking of those that are known to be true to the Bible, where the teachers are born-again believers. This is one great answer to a growing need. However, millions are not located near such a

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school. While this may be a wonderful answer to many, it cannot become the answer for all. Some states have political and educational leaders of some conviction. For an example in Arkansas, State Attorney General Bruce Bennett advised the schools to continue devotional exercises. He said, “Surely the troops won’t be called out to stop a teacher in conducting a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.” The same advice was handed down by Delaware’s Attorney General David P. Buckson. Perhaps the boldest statement was made by the Governor of Alabama and the State Board of Education of that great state. On September 2, 1963, the State Board of Education adopted a resolution making Bible reading compulsory in public schools. The resolution denounced the Supreme Court’s recent decision against Bible reading in public schools as a “calculated effort to take God out of the public affairs of this nation.” Gov. George Wallace, who introduced the resolution, said, “If this is ever challenged while I am Governor and the courts rule that we cannot read the Bible in that school, I’m going to that school and read it myself.” He continued, “I would like for the people of Alabama to be in defiance of the Supreme Court ruling. I want the Supreme Court to know we are not going to conform to any such decision. I want the state Board of Education to tell the whole world that we are not going to abide by it.” Now if you are fortunate enough to have leaders and teachers of such noble and courageous conviction, stand behind them in every possible way. Write them; phone them; and, other things being equal, re-elect or re-hire them. But this cannot be the answer for all, for many of us have leaders that have a column of jelly for a backbone. In Westbrook, Maine, where the school has had devotional exercises for 150 years, the board of education has substituted a program of patriotic and moral readings. A classic example of such surrender is in my own state of Kentucky. Attorney General John Breckinridge indicated (Wednesday, September 4, 1963) that all Bible reading and prayer in Kentucky’s public schools—even the voluntary kind—are illegal. He was asked by Superintendent of Public Instruction, Wendell Butler, “Do these decisions prohibit children, on a voluntary basis, from daily bible reading in the presence of other children in the common schools of Kentucky?” His answer was, “YES.” Again, “Do these decisions prohibit children, on a voluntary basis, from daily prayer in the presence of other children in the common schools of Kentucky?’ Again he answered, “YES.”

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Since our trust has been betrayed by “yes-men” on the state level, many of us must look elsewhere for an answer to the problem. One possible solution is found in amending the Constitution of the United States! There are now some sixty proposals before Congress for a constitutional amendment to permit religious observances, such as daily Bible readings or recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Public schools are no places for teaching particular doctrines or interpreting the Scripture. Leave that to the Holy Spirit in the church or at home!! However, we that believe the Book know that according to Isaiah 55:11, “My word . . . shall not return unto me void. . . .” saith the Lord. Therefore, let it be read daily, without comment, in the schools. Write your congressman and let him know your feelings about it. NOW IS THE TIME TO PUSH FOR AN AMENDMENT THAT WILL ENABLE OUR CHILDREN TO ENJOY THE SAME RELIGIOUS FREEDOM THAT WE HAVE ENJOYED. Suggest to your congressman that DAILY BIBLE READING of the King James Version be permitted in public schools. Another step in the right direction, Mother and Dad, is to take (not just send) those children to a Bible-believing church. Get them under the sound teaching of the Word of God. If the church you are now in isn’t standing without apology for the Word of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ, you’d better get out, open your eyes, and let God lead you to a place where the Bible is believed. Here is one thing that everyone can do, one thing that everyone should do, and one thing that some of us shall do. Open that Book of books daily in your home with the family circle gathered around! It matters not whether you are already saved; you owe it to your family, your country. Open that bible and, with your family, become a daily bible student. Therein you will find the necessity of the new birth! Repent! RECEIVE CHRIST! Be saved! Then your school-age children will be easily won to Christ. Let us win our children to Christ in the home and send them back into a ripe harvest field at school to be “little missionaries.”

h NOTES The author would like to thank Milton Gaither, Benjamin Justice, Candace A. Mulcahy, Kathryn Kear, Andy Cavagnetto, Dell Johnson, and Walter Schumacher for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 1. Duane T. Gish, “The Scientific Case for Creation,” in Frank Awbrey and William Thwaites, eds., Evolutionists Confront Creationists: Proceedings of the 63rd

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Annual Meeting of the Pacific Division, American Association for the Advancement of Science, vol. I, part 3 (San Francisco: Pacific Division, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1984), 26; Jerry Bergman, The Criterion: Religious Discrimination in America (Richfield, MN: Onesimus Press, 1984), vi, xiii, xv, 6. 2. William Jennings Bryan, “Dr. Birge, Autocrat,” The Commoner 22 (May 1922). 3. Paula Fass, Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 4. Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 5. See Donald Dayton and Robert Johnston, eds., The Variety of American Evangelicalism (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991); George M. Marsden, ed., Evangelicalism and Modern America (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984); Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George A. Rawlyk, eds., Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 6. Edward Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Ronald L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 76–91; Jeffrey P. Moran, The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2002); George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); see also the author’s “Roots of the Culture Wars: Protestant Fundamentalism and American Education in the 1920s,” (PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin—Madison, 2006). 7. Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 187–210. 8. Donald E. Boles, The Two Swords: Commentaries and Cases in Religion and Education (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1967), 67–116; “Report: The month’s Worldwide News in brief,” Moody Monthly 64 (January 1964), 8; William Culbertson, “Is the Supreme Court Right?” Moody Monthly 63 (July–August 1963), 16. See also Joan DelFatorre, The Fourth R: Conflicts over Religion in America’s Public Schools (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 9. David Nevin and Robert E. Bills, The Schools that Fear Built: Segregationist Academies in the South (Washington, DC: Acropolis Books, 1976); v, 2, 21–22; Virginia Davis Nordin and William Lloyd Turner, “More than Segregation Academies: The Growing Protestant Fundamentalist Schools,” Phi Delta Kappan (February 1980): 391–394; Joseph Crespino, “Civil Rights and the Religious Right,” in Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making American Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 96. 10. Gerald Skoog, “The Coverage of Human Evolution in High School Biology Textbooks in the 20th Century and in Current State Science Standards,” Science and Education (2005) 14; Dorothy Nelkin, Science Textbook Controversies and the Politics of Equal Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 27–30. 11. Jeffrey P. Moran, Teaching Sex: the Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 170, 181, 182 [Hargis quota-

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tion]; James Huffman, “Sex Education in Public Schools,” Christianity Today 13 (September 26, 1969): 1118–1119 [“unbiblical, relativistic”]. 12. Nelkin, Science Textbook Controversies, 30–35. 13. Bergman, The Criterion, 43; John R. Rice, “White Minorities Have Rights, Too,” Sword of the Lord 31 (September 3, 1965), 1. 14. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 158–165. 15. George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 7. 16. Paul F. Parsons, Inside America’s Christian Schools (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987), x; Alan Peshkin, God’s Choice, 26; Characteristics of Private Schools in the United States: Results from the 2001–2002 Private School Universe Survey (NCES 2005-305). U.S. Department of Education. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, 9. 17. Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe, “Poor Children and Enlightened Citizens: Lutheran Education in America, 1748–1800,” Pennsylvania History 2001 68(2): 162–201. Peter P. DeBoer, “North American Calvinist Day Schools,” in Thomas C. Hunt and James C. Carper, eds., Religious Schools in the United States K–12: A Source Book (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993): 69–95; Jon Diefenthaler, “Lutheran Schools in Transition,” Hunt and Carper, eds., Religious Schools in the United States K–12: 419–443; D. Bruce Lockerbie, The Way They Should Go (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 23–41; Daniel L. Turner, Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University (Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press, 1997), 37; John F. Blanchard, Jr., “Yes, You Can Have a Christian School!” Moody Monthly 64 (May 1964), 34–35, 55–60; Mark A. Fakkema, “Christian Schools and How to Establish Them,” Christian Life (September 1947): 20–21; Basic Principles of the Christian Schools of America, (Grand Rapids, MI: National Union of Christian Schools, n.d. [1925]); The Bible and the Christian Schools of America, (Chicago: National Union of Christian Schools, 1925, repr. 1926). 18. Nordin and Turner, “More than Segregation Academies,” 391; Phillip Smith, Provost Emeritus, Bob Jones University, personal communication, June 5, 2008. 19. Ray Chamberlin, “Prayer and Bible in Public Schools,” Sword of the Lord 30 (January 17, 1964): 12; “Editorial: Education and the Evangelical Minority,” Christianity Today 8 (February 28, 1964): 502–504; Jon Reid Kennedy, “School Readings: Question of Inspiration,” Christian Beacon 30 (September 16, 1965): 5. 20. Kenneth M. Dolbeare and Phillip E. Hammond, The School Prayer Decisions: From Court Policy to Local Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), x, 28. 21. David Nevin and Robert E. Bills, The Schools that Fear Built: Segregationist Academies in the South (Washington, DC: Acropolis Books, 1976), 26, 2; Weyrich quoted in William Martin, With God on Our Side: the Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1996), 173. 22. Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950s (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1969, revised edition 1997), 248–249; James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A

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Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 99; Joseph Crespino, “Civil Rights and the Religious Right,” 93; Michael Fuquay, “Civil Rights and the Private School Movement in Mississippi,” History of Education Quarterly 42 (Summer 2002): 159–180. 23. Nevin and Bills, Schools that Fear Built, 2; Gary Orfield, Public School Desegregation in the United States, 1968–1980 (Washington, DC: Joint Center for Political Studies, 1983), 1–2. 24. Mark Newman, Getting Right with God: Southern Baptists and Desegregation, 1945–1995 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2001), 106. 25. Roger Biles, “A Bittersweet Victory: Public School Desegregation in Memphis,” The Journal of Negro Education 55 (Autumn 1986): 479–481. 26. Newman, Getting Right with God, 51 [Cameron resolution]; Jane Dailey, “The Theology of Massive Resistance: Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred after Brown,” in Clive Webb, ed., Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction (New York, Oxford University Press, 2005), 151–180. 27. Mark Taylor Dalhouse, An Island in the Lake of Fire: Bob Jones University, Fundamentalism, and the Separatist Movement (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 156–158; Aaron Haberman, “Into the Wilderness, Ronald Reagan, Bob Jones University, and the Political Education of the Christian Right,” The Historian 67 (2005): 234–253; Dailey, “The Theology of Massive Resistance,” 171; Daniel L. Turner, Standing without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University (Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press, 1997), 223–238. 28. Jerry H. Combee, “Human Nature and Christian Education: The Connection between Discipline, Curriculum, and Methods,” in A. A. Baker, The Successful Christian School: Foundational Principles for Starting and Operating a Successful Christian School (Pensacola, FL: A Beka Book Publications, 1979), 176; Biles, “A Bittersweet Victory,” 481. 29. “Bob Jones versus Everybody: Its Views on Biblical Separation Are Not Shared by Most Conservative Christian Schools,” Christianity Today (19 February 1982): 26–27. David L. Chappell, “Disunity and Religious Institutions in the White South,” in Clive Webb, ed., Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction (New York, Oxford University Press, 2005), 137–138; Barry Hankins, Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservatives and American Culture (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 14–40. 30. Newman, Getting Right with God, 89. 31. Charles T. Clotfelder, After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 75, 109–110; Nordin and Turner, “More than Segregation Academies,” 392. 32. Martha E. MacCullough, “Factors Which Led Christian School Parents to Leave Public School,” (Ed.D. dissertation, Temple University, 1984), 114, 149, 212. 33. Clotfelder, After Brown, 103. 34. Directory of the American Association of Christian Schools (Normal, IL: American Association of Christian Schools, 1982 and 1988). 35. Clotfelder, After Brown, 109; Gary Orfield, Public School Desegregation in the United States, 1968–1980 (Washington, DC: Joint Center for Political Studies, 1983), 1, 36; Directory of the American Association of Christian Schools 1982, 24–30.

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36. James C. Carper and Jeffrey A. Daignault, “Christian Day Schools: Past, Present, and Future,” in Thomas C. Hunt and James C. Carper, eds., Religious Schools in the United States, K–12: A Source Book (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993), 321–322. 37. Clotfelder, After Brown, 103; MacCullough, “Factors Which Led Christian School Parents to Leave Public School,” 53. 38. Gary Orfield and Susan E. Eaton, eds., Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education (New York: New Press, 1996), 62–63. 39. Clotfelder, After Brown, 110. 40. Nevin and Bills, The Schools that Fear Built. 41. Phillip Smith, Provost Emeritus, Bob Jones University, personal communication, June 5, 2008; Walter Fremont, “The Christian School Movement Today,” speech delivered July 31, 1989, audiotape in Bob Jones University archives; A. A. Baker, The Successful Christian School: Foundational Principles for Starting and Operating a Successful Christian School (Pensacola, FL: A Beka Book Publications, 1979), 74–76; “You Don’t Want to Miss the A Beka Book One-Day Area Meetings,” advertisement, Sword of the Lord (January 29, 1982): 14. 42. Gary Coombs, “ACE, An Individualized Approach to Christian Education,” Interest, Sept. 1978, 9–10; “History and Development of ACE,” CLA Defender, vol. 1, no. 5, 1978, 6, 25–26; “Facts about Accelerated Christian Education,” (Lewisville, TX: ACE, n.d. [1982?]); Dell Johnson, Accelerated Christian Education, personal communication, September 17, 2008. 43. Daniel L. Turner, Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University (Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press, 1997), 265 44. “History and Purpose of the AACS,” AACS Newsletter (October 1987); AACS Directory (Normal, IL: AACS, 1986); “Introducing the AACS,” (Normal, IL: AACS, n.d.); James C. Carper and Thomas C. Hunt, The Dissenting Tradition in American Education (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 204. 45. Roy W. Lowrie, Jr., “From the Director: NCSEA + OACS + WACS = IACS,” Christian School Administrator and Teacher (Winter 1978); John Schimmer, “Certification for Christian School Teachers and Administrators,” Christian School Administrator and Teacher (Winter 1980): 4–5, 23; “Accreditation by the Association of Christian Schools International,” Christian School Administrator and Teacher (Summer 1981): 16–18; “Presenting the Association of Christian Schools International,” (Whittier, CA: ACSI, n.d., [1979?]); Carper and Hunt, Dissenting Tradition, 204; Peter P. DeBoer, “North American Calvinist Day Schools,” in Thomas C. Hunt and James C. Carper, eds., Religious Schools in the United States K–12, A Source Book (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993): 69–95. 46. Nordin and Turner, “More than Segregation Academies,” 392. 47. John F. Blanchard, Jr., “Yes, You Can Have a Christian School!” Moody Monthly 64 (May 1964), 34–35, 55–60; “Introducing the AACS,” (Normal, IL: AACS, n.d.). 48. See, e.g., Brad and Susanne Dacus, Reclaim Your School! Ten Steps to Practically and Legally Evangelize Your School (Citrus Heights, CA: Pacific Justice Institute, 2002).

10 ✛

The Austin T.E.A. Party: Homeschooling Controversy in Texas, 1986–1994 Ryan McIlhenny

I

n the spring of 1986, thousands of parents and their children met at the University of Texas, Austin, to protest attempts by the Texas Education Agency (T.E.A.) to regulate private and home-based education. “Challenged to make a stand,” former State Board of Education member Reginald McDaniel encouraged parents to “resist rigorously the encroachment of government into private affairs.”1 To the surprise of the T.E.A., thousands of religiously conservative and historically-minded homeschoolers, holding signs reading “Remember Boston? Dump T.E.A.,” launched a formidable political offensive against what they saw as the threat of state interference into the home. Unsolicited government infringement in the private sphere portended the demise of the family, the source of social, political, and cultural stability. The parents’ goal at the Austin gathering was to protect the “traditional” family unit against the corrosive effects of secularism as represented in the actions of the state. “The state wants control of our children,” said Steve Riddell, a homeschool parent and evangelical minister who attended the T.E.A. party “and we find it very difficult to stand idly by and let this happen.”2 The “Austin T.E.A. Party,” as grassroots religious parents called it, was the midpoint of a cultural controversy surrounding education reform that offered political support to the religious right in America. Looking at the nation as a whole, scholars have roughly identified the 1970s as the 211

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beginning of the homeschool movement; 1986 was a watershed year, for the majority of states granted legal protection for families who educated at home. Texas became one of the last. Considering the activism in the lone star state, this chapter analyzes the key elements of the homeschool movement’s success: shared ideological commitments, social makeup, and the means by which religiously motivated parents swiftly mobilized for political action. The goal is to complicate liberal and conservative assumptions concerning this specific form of education, including the idea that it emerged organically from the religious right despite the fact that it quickly became a subcategory of American conservative history and that the Texas protesters—and right-wing conservatives in general—represented what scholars have considered a “paranoid” expression of “status anxiety.” Patricia Lines, research analyst on education, finance, and government management for the U.S. Department of Education, admitted in an early 1990s publication that homeschooling is one of the most rapidly growing forms of education in American history.3 Much of her data was taken from the mid-eighties, and, although numbers vary, Lines estimated that one million American children were homeschooled in the early 1990s. That number was up from an estimated 300,000 in the late 1980s and from 15,000 in the early 1970s. The popularity of homeschooling continues to grow. The information offered by the Department of Education reveals the main participants of the movement. According to Lines, “The largest growth in homeschooling appears to be among devout Christian parents who are unhappy with the secular nature of the other schools.”4 Writing in the Dallas Morning News, homeschooling parent Connie Pryzant identified religion as the “forth R” when it came to private education. A 1997 study showed that 85 percent of those who chose domestic education did so based on staunchly religious grounds.5 Many homeschooling families are members of fundamentalist and evangelical denominations associated with conservative politics.6 During the past decade, those numbers have increased and accompanying political links have strengthened.7 Yet because of their political and religious allegiances, home educators are often portrayed as political reactionaries anxious to maintain their cultural status in society. Since the 1950s, especially in light of the tragedy of McCarthyism, sociologists, political scientists, historians, and religious scholars have tried to account for the episodic outbursts from the radical (often extreme) conservative camp.8 The longstanding assumption has been that the fear of secular humanism and its various embodiments—evolution, communism, big government, and feminism, to name a few—generated group angst over cultural leadership among both New Right conservatives and New Christian Right fundamentalists in the later half of the twentieth century.

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Detailing the rise of the New Right during the McCarthy era, Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, and Seymour Lipset, borrowing from sociopsychological intellectual terminology of the mid-century, suggested that a sense of persecution and the loss of cultural influence heightened a paranoid style that came to characterize radical conservatism. With the threat of communism and the emergence of leftist influence, the conservative’s world seemed to be on the verge of collapse; rapid mobilization to maintain it was paramount. Stated simply, a loss (or potential loss) of status engendered activism, which often appeared to be fed by psychological distress or personality disorders rather than rational decision making.9 Status anxiety differs from class anxiety because the latter is often caused by economic trouble. Talcott Parsons understands the process as a universal component of all societies, arguing in his 1969 Politics and Social Structure that the very essence of change depends upon it: “It is a generalization well established in social science that neither individuals nor societies can undergo major structural changes with the likelihood of producing a considerable element of ‘irrational’ behavior.”10 If Parsons is correct, then it may be a bit unfair to see fundamentalist conservatives as the sole group of “irrational actors expressing their status anxieties.”11 Contemporary scholarship, however, has in a more direct way refuted the status-anxiety hypothesis. The argument that the conservative right surfaced as a result of psychological and social frustrations has, according to Lisa McGirr, “distorted our understanding of American conservatism.”12 Focusing on the socioeconomic conditions that gave rise to the contemporary right in her book, Suburban Warriors, McGirr “traces the transformation of the modern American Right from a marginal force tagged as ‘extremist’ in the early 1960s into the mainstream of national life by the decade’s end.”13 Looking specifically at southern California, the holy land of national conservatism, McGirr underscores their skill at quick mobilization and political persuasion on a mass scale. Accordingly, the right has been effective in reshaping American politics from the ground up. McGirr, however, ignores the philosophical problems endemic to claims of communal psychoses. In his book, The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Right, sociologist Steven Bruce—who outlines the advent and collapse of New Christian Right activists Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Phyllis Schlafly, to a name a few, and issues involving them—believes that scholars must abandon assumptions regarding rational or irrational mentalities of radical groups; instead, they should examine all social movements in the same light. He writes: [The] interpretive sociologist doubts the explanatory value of asserting that any one particular view of the ‘facts of the situation’ has such obvious

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validity that alternative views can be dismissed as the product of unusual, hysterical, and irrational interpretative procedures. To say this is not to endorse extremist worldviews. It is simply to say that the explanation of why people believe something cannot be bound to the truth or falsity of the belief in question. There may actually be a God. There may actually be some divine providence which makes sense of the apparent anarchy which surrounds us. There is nothing which the social scientist knows which gives him or her an insight into such questions any greater than that possessed by the average Klansman or John Bircher. Hence no system of social scientific explanation can be based on a distinction between true and false believe.14

Academia has failed to provide standards to judge moral claims, let alone the warranted authority to dogmatically declare them. Bruce contends with the notion that conservative fundamentalism has been underscored by irrational motives. First, for Bruce, scholars have no agreed upon criteria for what constitutes true or false beliefs vis-à-vis politics or religion. Pinpointing irrationality presupposes a standard for rationality. Second, the historian’s gifted eye, in fact, undermines claims of irrationality; that is, scholars take for granted the fact that even ultraconservatives like McCarthy or Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, failed to provide palpable evidence that their claims—namely, that communists were in fact destroying America’s cherished institutions—were in fact true. (This is not to suggest that either McCarthy or Welch were right in their respective campaigns.) A lack of evidence for what may seem to be outlandish claims can quickly turn into accusations of irrationality. Studies of the political activism of homeschool families have also rejected the paranoid hypothesis. Today’s researchers and policy analysts “interpret the dynamics of the home education’s growth as a rational legitimate educational choice by increasingly large numbers of families.”15 Maralee Mayberry, writing for the journal of Education and Urban Society, affirms the rational order of homeschool families. The overwhelming majority of which are not made up of “irrational individuals responding to economic or status deprivation, but rather, are individuals attempting to sustain a way of life that protects and revitalizes a stable set of meanings.”16 Despite recent criticism, the status anxiety and paranoid style continue to appear. Was there evidence that the state, acting in concert with public schools according to Texas Representative Randy Pennington, wanted “to control children, and ultimately the world”?17 Was the Texas Education Agency acting with ulterior motives to subvert the authority of parents, or worse, to take the children away from their parents? Based on the evidence examined for this chapter, one would have to answer such questions in the negative. Yet the status anxiety hypothesis has been narrow in its focus, hardly ever applied to nonconservative groups. Similar

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questions offered above could be asked of the state agencies interfering in the lives of homeschool families. School superintendents falsely assumed that parents with no state credentials were not only impeding the educational maturity of their children, but also stunting their social maturity, an opinion not supported by scholarly evidence. As a case in point, many who have examined this issue argue that homeschool families are more socially active than public school families.18 Out of fairness, should we assume that superintendents who went after the homeschooling parents in Texas were anxious to maintain their social statue, to win the culture wars? Why, then, have state agencies gone after homeschooling families? In an article written for the American School Board Journal entitled “Read This Before You Veto Home-Education,” Marion Ritter offers a simple answer by turning the paranoid hypothesis on its head: “The increase in litigation can be attributed, in part, to the distress administrators felt when suddenly confronted with multiple cases of parents who thought they could educate children better than public schools.”19 Regarding this issue, do school boards and state legislators suffer from paranoia or irrationality? While most states in the mid-eighties agreed that unaccredited teachers were unfit to teach, there is no reason to assume that they worked to subvert the authority of the family. The goal of state agencies has been to make sure that each child received a basic education. The problem for many parents, however, comes when the state steamrolls the right of parents to make decisions on behalf of their children. Another problem relates to the failings of many public state schools and the greater success, in terms of test scores and college enrollment, among students in the homeschool sector. There is an undeniable power struggle going on. Upon closer analysis, one finds no apparent connection between the homeschool movement and the rise of radical conservatism. What sets the movement apart from the conservatism of the 1950s and the religious activism of the 1970s is its defensive nature. Radical conservatives in the 1950s and 1960s, in the spirit of Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society, were on the offensive, searching out suspected subversives. Their efforts failed, however. The New Religious Right (e.g., Falwell’s Moral Majority or Robertson’s Christian Coalition) lobbied against a variety of single issues, which included the content of public school textbooks (e.g., evolution and sex education), and campaigned for seats in local, state, and federal offices. They, too, disintegrated institutionally in the late 1980s, although aspects of the political agenda remain. Today homeschool parents fight to maintain their traditional beliefs and practices against outside attack.20 Texas homeschoolers, many of them Christians, became agitated when social and cultural threats loomed. Yet rather than dismiss their actions as

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a manifestation of a broken mind, begging the question that conservatives deviate from reality, one should look at the homeschoolers from a different angle. Doing so will reveal the existence of a competing interpretation of reality, two different worlds—the physical and spiritual. In the early 1990s, scholars at the University of Michigan published an essay detailing the history of the homeschool movement, identifying the groups involved.21 Beginning in the mid-sixties, the authors identified five interrelated phases of the movement: (1) Contention (education reform initiated by the Pedagogues in the mid-sixties); (2) Confrontation (increased tension in the 1970s between homeschoolers and public administrators); (3) Cooperation (an easing of legal requirements and better relationships between the home and local public schools in the mid-eighties); (4) Consolidation (numerical growth, networking, legislative lobbying, and greater public acceptance); (5) Compartmentalization (distinguishing between different homeschooling organizations). The citizens involved in the Austin T.E.A. party and those associated with the religious right joined the movement toward the beginning of the second phase. Two interrelated secular and religious strands characterized the movement. The authors appropriately categorized members of the first group, “Pedagogues,” as those interested in the social and cognitive benefits of teaching in the home. Compelled to initiate education reform in the mid1960s, Pedagogues, although critical of public schools, were not identified predominantly by their religious or political affiliations. They never expressed fears that a virulent secularism corroded social morality. Educators like John Holt, progenitor of the movement, Herbert Ivoch, and Ivan Illich represented this group. Pedagogues have a twofold philosophy of education. First, the home is the most conducive and natural environment for learning the basic subjects—viz., reading, writing, arithmetic, science, and civics—regularly taught in the more artificial institutional setting. Children learn best when they interact with their environment. In a 1981 interview with Marlene Anne Bumgarmer, contributing editor of Mothering Magazine, John Holt argued that his reasons for advocating homeschooling was not due to the necessarily “badness of public schools,” but rather that the “school is an artificial institution, and the home is a very nature one. There are lots of societies without schools, but never without homes. Home is the center of the circle from which one moves out in all directions.”22 Institutions stifle learning, because they separate knowledge from experience. Furthermore, the private sphere removes unnecessary pressure. Second, thinkers in this group advocate a radical reform method often referred to as the “unschooling” method, whereby the child has the ability to control the process of his or her own learning. Illich, furthermore, has viewed standardization as not only arbitrary, but also too general to accommodate the

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mental development or capacity of single students. The reasons offered by both Holt and Illich set them apart from religiously-minded home educators. Nonetheless, such pedagogical reasons have been a great benefit to religious homeschoolers. The authors of the Michigan study label the second group “Ideologues.” This cohort, more socially visible than their associates, is primarily motivated by religious and moral concerns. Like the former, their philosophy of education can be divided into two halves. First, stemming from their moral vision, they see the public school as the storehouse of all that is secular, atheistic, and immoral. Leaders of this group include conservatives like Raymond and Dorothy Moore, Rousas J. Rushdoony, and Samuel Blumenfeld. Second, ideologues place greater emphasis on the role of the parents as a biblical mandate, specifically the authority they exercise over their children. According to Ideologues, the message advanced in public school textbooks is one that flouts the values and morality of the family.23 Strict pedagogy seems to be secondary. This was the primary reason behind the actions of Austin parents against T.E.A. Interestingly, the parents in the Texas debacle straddled the categories of both “Pedagogues” and “Ideologues.” Most of the parents quoted in the state’s newspapers after the April event first cited pedagogical reasons for choosing domestic education. In a 1984 interview for the Houston Chronicle, Susan Bradrick, Ruth Canon, and Paula Hill gave both pedagogical reasons for choosing homeschooling. “Our philosophy is that education occurs at every waking hour. There’s no part of the day that isn’t educationally valuable.”24 Yet in the same breath, they admitted that their ultimate aim was simply to instill religious values and build character in their children. Gary and Cheryl Leeper, parents who initiated a class action lawsuit against more than 1,000 school districts in 1985, commented that the quality of education in the public schools stifled the cognitive development of their two young sons. Both boys were behind in cognitive development and both exhibited poor reading and math skills. But the Leeper’s activities and associations revealed that they were indeed “Ideologues.” Not only did they spend around $100 a month on materials from Pensacola Christian College, a fundamentalist institution and one of the largest providers of home and private school education, but they also enrolled their children in the Christian Liberty Academy, a networking organization led by Christian Reconstructionists. Raymond Moore, Samuel Blumfeld, and R. J. Rushdoony, key figures of the ideological strand, testified on behalf of homeschool families in the Leeper case. While they explicitly invoked notions of pedagogy, their actions pointed in the direction of religious ideology. Ideologues have dominated the movement since the mid-eighties. The parents in Austin cited both academic achievement and religion as two essential reasons for choosing home education.

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Opposition to the T.E.A. stemmed from parents’ strong belief commitments. In order to more fully understand the motivation behind these families, it would be helpful to provide a broad overview of the underlying worldview of religious conservatives. First, they interpret the world from a Manichean point of view.25 Reality is caught in a dialectic tension between good and evil, light and darkness, the spiritual and physical. Yet a difficulty that many fundamentalists have faced has been the distinction between spirit (or spirituality) and nature. When it comes to the mundane aspects of everyday life the lines between the two worlds blur. Their duty in the physical world is to focus on the spiritual; social and political involvement or any kind of physical embodiment of the metaphysical can at times stymie personal piety. Questions related to whether or not one should become politically involved are never satisfactorily answered. The vagueness of such a mindset has a significant effect on social activism. Living under the ethical maxim of being part of the world while being separate from it, a number of Christians struggle with maintaining a balance between activism in society and retreat from it. Perhaps this suggests reasons why fundamentalist political participation has been at times erratic and unstable.26 Homeschool curriculum plays a role in shaping views about the world. Parents inculcate Christian values through textbook lessons saturated with Christian cultural overtones.27 James Barlow, a writer for the Houston Chronicle, described a homeschool in 1986: “Letters of the alphabet, featuring Bible verses and Christian sayings, hang from the walls next to three desks in the makeshift classroom. The letter ‘G’ is followed by ‘God is love’ and ‘N’ by ‘No man can serve two masters.’”28 The majority of inexpensive homeschool curricula have been developed by evangelical publishing companies including A Beka, Bob Jones, and KONOS. Each lesson is tagged with a didactic moral reminder. History is one of the most sacred subjects. For many Texas homeschoolers, history—an unfolding ontology rather than an intellectual activity (the word history means “inquiry” or “investigation”)—is controlled by God, and for students, it is a cauldron of eternal truths that reoccur time and again, serving as a lesson in morality and character development for both individual and society, calling one back to more noble days when early colonial America, for instance, was a veritable holy land to some of the early European settlers. These families adopt a Livy-Santayana model of history: those who fail to mimic the virtues of historical characters become harbingers of social decline. The social science books published by these companies develop activities that encourage students to emulate characters like Cicero, Alexander the Great, John Smith, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and even Robert E. Lee.29 These historical lessons contrast sharply with the revisionism found in most college and univer-

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sity textbooks, which may contribute to the feeling of alienation from the secular establishment. Austin parents saw their campaign against the T.E.A. as a moral and historical crusade. Nine-year-old Brian Way, studying the character of Sam Houston and his fight for Texas independence, anticipated a trip to Austin in April of 1986 to experience state tyranny firsthand.30 Beyond that, the very title of the event, “The Austin T.E.A. Party,” or the signs that the opposition carried, “Remember Boston? Dump T.E.A,” played on the past, evoking notions of libertarian patriotism and legitimizing rebellion from a tyrannical government.31 These parents were simply doing what their colonial forefathers did. Ideological commitments—i.e., the effects of a dual perspective on reality, the plasticity and effectiveness of spiritual interpretations despite physical change, and the use of history as political propaganda—must not be underestimated. Margaret Ann Latus writes, “the task of grassroots organizing is usually already partly done . . . the religious motivation for behavior can be pervasive and powerful.”32 Writing in Review of Religious Research in 1991, Vernon Bates argued that homeschoolers “wished to transform their ideology into reality in order to protect their religious convictions and to have some official control over the means of cultural reproduction.”33 Scholars, shifting their focus away from “social-psychological theories,” look at how beliefs are socially and politically channeled, an analytic approach referred to as “resource mobilization.”34 With ideology firmly in place, religious conservatives rely on the family unit for political action. Of the two, the “traditional” family is central. As a divinely established entity, it is the cohesive force that keeps society intact. The adjective “traditional” first connotes a monogamous and mutual relationship between one man and one woman for the propagation of human society. It also suggests, especially in contemporary circles, a relatively close-knit economy that often results in a sheltered life for the children. Not only do such conservatives reject nontraditional families, especially ones with parents of the same-sex, they also agree to maintain a patriarchal authority structure. Paradoxically, however, while fathers are ideally “heads” (a term not always clearly defined by those who accept it) of their households financially and spiritually, mothers play a prominent and in many cases dominant role. “These women,” writes Mitchell Stevens in Kingdom of Children, a history of the homeschool movement, “are full-time mothers, but they also are engines of elaborate family projects and the brick and mortar of an impressive social movement infrastructure.”35 Mothers act as both homemakers and home educators. Whether or not the myriad media organizations realized it, every newspaper that recounted the homeschool events in Texas since the early 1980s—especially

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the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, and the Austin AmericanStateman—interviewed mothers and detailed their place in both the private and public spheres. Many of the legal cases in which a homeschool family was prosecuted centered on the activities of nonaccredited mothers who trained their children at home.36 Consequently, a number of women have become politically active, extending their influence beyond the confines of the private sector. They have created numerous institutional support groups like the Advanced Training Institute (ATI) for homeschooling families and have acted as editors of widely read publications, including Mothering Magazine, Practical Homeschooling Magazine, and Teaching Home. Austin’s conservative mothers and educators found adequate reason to enter the political arena. What appears to be contradictory is the fact that these women, without identifying themselves as such, are antifeminist feminists. While they criticize feminism, failing to identify the competing schools of feminist thought, they are equally indebted to it. According to Stevens, these women “live in a broader culture shaped significantly by a generation of liberal feminism.”37 Second wave feminists, those who railed against the suffocations of modern consumerism during the 1950s and 1960s, have laid the groundwork for wives to extend their authority within the private sphere itself. Rather than submit blithely to the whims of their husbands, conservative women inform men of their duties. In an article written in Christian Herald in the early 1990s, Beverly LaHaye, founder and chair of Concerned Women for America (CWA), reminded women of the imperative to support their male spouses, and she encouraged men to be mindful of their duties. Commenting on what women need, adopting a kind of cultural feminism, LaHaye writes: “Women long for their husbands to have more spiritual involvement with the children, who seek a role model.”38 The irony in LaHaye’s essay appears midway through the essay. She tells husbands how they are to accomplish their responsibilities and warns that the fate of society rests on their moral character and leadership: “the presence of a Godly man in the lives of his wife and children has far-reaching effects, extending to society as a whole.”39 While children of homeschoolers are at the bottom of the authority ladder, they are at the center of parents’ objectives. Another important tenet of religious ideology relates to humanity’s fallen sinful state and the need for parental guidance. This is both ideological and sociological, for the way in which children are conceptualized is the way they will be treated, especially by their parents. The surest way of protecting children is for parents to inculcate important spiritual values. Children, born sinners (i.e., by nature in rebellion against God), also rebel against the earthly authority of their parents, who, according Christian doctrine, are representatives of God on earth. To counter these natural tendencies,

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they need spiritual and moral discipline and guidance. Proper instruction not only prepares them for the next life, but also protects them from the ubiquitous and virile “wisdom” of the world. Most religious parents are wary of sending their children to an academic institution marred by secular humanism, which, to them, flouts God’s law, resulting inevitably in moral decay. When the state or any of its agencies undermines the rights of families it abuses its own authority. The parents at the Austin T.E.A. Party and the litigants in the Leeper case opposed the supposed presumption of the state to assume the role of parent. The next important social institution is the church, a spiritual community that fosters a shared cultural identity. Religious conservatives regularly attend local ecclesiastical bodies. They are not only regular church attendees, involved in typical Sunday morning exercises; they are also active in separate weekly programs for men, women, and children. They are taken care of spiritually and economically, watched over by an active religious government. For most ideologues, church leaders play an important role in social leadership, and the church as a whole can be an efficient mobilizing force. What is more, evangelicals also seek the help of parachurch organizations. Engaged in secular rather than ecclesiastical duties, they provide legitimate legal, financial, and political services to give further aid to congregations. Represented at the homeschool rally in Texas were selfproclaimed Christian Reconstructionists. Committed to establishing in America the moral and judicial order found in the Old Testament theocracy, Reconstructionists led Oregon’s Parents Education Association Political Action Committee (PEAPAC) and the homeschooling networking organization, Christian Liberty Academy (CLA) in Illinois. The identified paladin, Rousas J. Rushdoony, established an organization in the midsixties dedicated to Christian education called Chalcedon. This institution’s intent was to destroy the secularism that dominated state run schools as a means to Christianize the American nation. Robert Billings, former Moral Majority activist and later member of the Department of Education during Reagan’s presidency, once remarked: “If it weren’t for [Rushdoony’s] books, none of us would be here.”40 Rushdoony commended the actions of Austin’s conservative cohort, and was a witness (along with Raymond Moore and Samuel Blumenfeld) in the legal battle over private schooling in Texas in the mid-eighties. Reconstructionist strategy extends beyond education. Adherents of Rushdoony’s philosophy are also concerned with amending the economic, political, cultural, and religious structure of today’s society. They espouse a philosophy known as “dominion” theology. Christians are obliged to take dominion over all aspects of society by returning to the absolute, infallible standard of morality: the ethical maxims and judicial

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stipulations delineated in both the Old and New Testament scriptures. Since the 1980s, dominionists have maintained a beachhead in Texas. In the early 1990s, Reconstructionists in Harris County organized “conservative churches into a formidable political machine,” wrote Joseph Conn, and ousted moderate Republican County Chairwoman Betsey Lake. She was replaced by Steven Hotze, Houston’s coordinator for the Coalition on Revival (COR), a theological ally of Rushdoony, and board member of the Christian Reconstructionist publication Biblical Worldview, edited by American Vision director Gary DeMar, also an admirer of Rushdoony and Reconstructionism. Hotze’s intent in capturing the Harris County GOP was, as he said in 1993, “to restore America to its Christian heritage,” reinstate God’s (Old Testament) law, and turn back the tide of progressive legislation that protected gay rights, government schools, and the legality of abortion.41 Unsuccessful in the mainline political arena, Reconstructionists have made significant gains in securing the rights of parents to educate their children at home. Along with mass mailings, phone campaigns, organizational networking, and newspaper publishing to distribute important legislative issues (traditional activities of the right), the most effective tactic utilized by homeschoolers has been the establishment of local and national support groups, including legal organizations and political action committees. With a few minor exceptions, private and homeschool advocates have been protected—wittingly or not—by America’s courts. In 1925 the Supreme Court delivered the first major precedent favoring private religious education. Originating in Oregon, the court’s ruling in Pierce v. Society of Sisters struck down a law that required attendance at public schools only. Two years later another state law granted the territory of Hawaii “unlimited regulatory control over its private schools” but was reversed by the high court in Farrington v. Tokushige.42 And in the 1972 Wisconsin v. Yoder case the court allowed Amish parents the right to control the education of their children.43 These decisions, though not focused on fundamentalist activity, recognized the legality of private schools and reaffirmed parental authority. Consider the decision offered by Pierce: “the child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”44 The opinion expressed captured philosophical aspects of both Ideologues and Pedagogues. Likewise both the Farrington and Yoder cases protected the religiously motivated actions of parents. In fact, the lower courts have extended the Yoder decision to “person with traditional theistic ‘religious beliefs.’”45 In April 1986 Texas parents emphasized their roles: “The parent is the steward of the child not the state. The issue is who is going to make the decision, the parent or the state?”46

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By the early 1980s, three states—Utah, Nevada, and Ohio—allowed parents to run an educational program in the privacy of their own homes. Domestic education rapidly became a popular alternative to state sponsored schools. Yet, granting legal status has been different for each state. Noticing the rise of the movement, Michael Farris, attorney and former Moral Majority activist, established the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA).47 The organization launched its first affirmative action suit against the state of Washington in 1983. Legal action initiated by the HSLDA has been successful in a number of states. Texas was more difficult to tackle. Since the turn of the twentieth century, no legal rule protecting domestic education existed in Texas. Yet at the dawn of the 1980s, the Texas Education Agency proposed criteria for establishing once and for all specific requirements for the legal recognition of private schools. Parents had hoped that home education would be included in the requirements. They were sadly disappointed. The Texas Education Agency authorized both private and homeschools to abide by the rules set up for public school educators—viz., that all Texas teachers be state certified and graduates of an accredited university. Consequently, in the eyes of Rich Arnet, a deputy commissioner for the T.E.A., homeschooling became illegal.48 In 1981, the T.E.A. prosecuted 150 families for failing to abide by the compulsory attendance law, which required students between the ages of 6 and 17 to attend a legitimate Texas school. Superintendent Michael Say commented in 1986 that of fifteen cases in which “children were found to be staying at home instead of attending school, only four of those involved homeschool situations. The rest were cases where children were getting no education at all.”49 Conservative parents, however, saw the situation differently. The secular state transgressed its legal authority when it invaded the divinely established family sphere. In 1985, Garry Leeper, his wife, Cheryl, and other parents, filed a class-action suit against the T.E.A. (Leeper et al. v. Texas Education Agency et al.) arguing that the agency’s disregard for home education reflected the administration’s violation of parental authority. Before the lower court decided the case, homeschool families gained the support of politicians such as Republican Kent Hance and former Mayor Bill Clements, intellectuals including Ray Moore, R. J. Rushdoony, and Samuel Blumenfeld, and a host of nonprofit legal organizations like Farris’s Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). State superintendents, school board members, and newly elected democratic Mayor Mark White were surprised by the rapid emergence of a grassroots cohort of private education supporters. The families won the lawsuit in 1987, securing their right to practice education at home free from government interference. But the decision was immediately

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appealed by the T.E.A. and sent to the 2nd District Court of Appeals in Fort Worth. The state agency, again, was unsuccessful; the appeals court affirmed the lower decision. The legal battle finally ended in the summer of 1994 when the Texas Supreme Court affirmed the lower court’s decision and thus protected the status of parents who educated in the home.50 In order to avoid any future legal confrontations between families and state legislatures, the HSLDA often teams up with like-minded agencies. In the same year that religious families protested the actions of Texas state agencies against homeschooling, fundamentalists in Oregon lobbied to approve a bill that would protect home educators. Oregon’s PEAPAC, the Oregon Christian (Home) Education Association Network (OCEAN) magazine The Teaching Home, edited by Sue Welch, and a host of likeminded political leaders were successful in passing the bill. Similar events occurred in Illinois. In order to maintain their legal status, parents, with the help of the HSLDA, formed the Christian Home Education Coalition (CHEC), a voluntary organization that monitors the legislative actions of the Illinois General Assembly. Through its magazine, The CHEC Connection, the group has been able to disseminate vital information regarding bills that would affect homeschool families. “The purpose of the groups,” writes Bates, “is to provide academic, structural, emotional, and spiritual support for the parents of homeschool children.”51 Bates continues: Support groups provide families with new curriculum materials, arrange group activities such as field trips and physical education activities, discuss common problems and common solutions in teaching at home, complain about the poor quality of the public schools, pray for God’s guidance and wisdom in their homeschool, share information about other support groups and schedule homeschooling events such as workshops, discuss politics, and engage in a variety of other activities one might expect from a group of likeminded individuals.52

The associations act as a kind of communal or extended family, much like a church, allowing parents—mainly mothers—to gain creative domestic ideas, make friends, and strengthen religious ties. They may also function as a way for wives to escape the confines of the domestic sphere. In the summer of 1994, headlines in the Austin American-Statesman read “Parents who teach their children at home were handed a victory Wednesday from the Texas Supreme Court, which decreed homeschools as essentially private schools and, thus, out of the state’s regulatory reach,” ending an eight-year battle between homeschool supporters and the Texas Education Agency.53 Homeschoolers gained their liberty from “government tyranny.” Chris Klicka, senior lawyer for HSLDA, said: “We believe this is a solid victory for homeschools in the state of Texas.” Both the

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Second Court of Appeals in Fort Worth and the Texas Supreme Court declared: “Homeschooling is legal and comes under the status of private schools.”54 One would expect that a tyrannical agency’s animosity would increase when its subjects rebelled and gained their freedom—or so the discourse goes for a Manichean. In reality, however, the state education agency not only submitted to the decision of the high court, but revealed its reasons for prosecuting in the first place: the academic well-being of Texas’ next generation. David Anderson, chief counsel for the T.E.A., showed no animosity toward the opposition and welcomed the decision as “a ‘decent compromise’ because it defined homeschools as private schools and recognized that the state has an interest in ensuring that all children receive a good education.” Anderson continued by saying that the decision recognized “that the kid gets educated and not where the kid is educated.” State Board of Education member Will Davis of Austin likewise supported parents’ rights to educate children at home: “We have always felt that homeschooling was in the nature of private schools, these young people get appropriate education.”55 After the T.E.A. party, Kirk McCord and Brad Chamberlain organized the Texas Home School Coalition (THSC), a political action committee that later merged with an allied organization, Home Oriented Private Education (HOPE). Timothy Lambert, participant in the T.E.A. controversy and current president of THSC, encouraged parents “to become an active member of the homeschool community in the never-ending battle to protect the freedom to teach our children without the interference of the government.”56 Today, the lone star state leads the nation in home education. Over two hundred homeschool support groups along with nearly fifty curriculum providers (half of which are religiously based) can be found in Texas. The 1986 political action of homeschool families in Texas has inspired other states to follow suit.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER 1) Identify the agents of social change in McIlhenny’s chapter. How would his argument change if the story were told from a different point of view?

2) Using the documents provided, discuss the worldview, social makeup and tactics employed for political mobilization by the homeschooling parents.

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3) Religion is a defining characteristic for social change, according to McIlhenny. Are politics, economics, social class, geography, gender, race/ethnicity more important than religion as a defining characteristic for social change?

4) Is homeschooling a “new” form of education? What prompts this action and how has it changed over time?

h IN THEIR WORDS The Houston Chronicle: June 16, 1994 (Thursday) “Homeschools win court fight: Ruling backs parents’ right to teach their own children” Wendy Benjaminson The Texas Supreme Court Wednesday upheld parents’ right to educate their own children, ending a decade-long legal battle over the state’s authority to monitor homeschools. The court said in a unanimous ruling that state education officials had no legal basis for their prosecution of 150 homeschool families since 1981, when a staff lawyer for the Texas Education Agency advised a school district that homeschools were illegal. That advice, followed by a 1985 class-action lawsuit, touched off the fight over whether homeschooled students—like those in private schools—are exempt from the state’s 99-year-old compulsory attendance law. “Texas law does not require children who are taught in legitimate homeschools to attend public schools,” the Supreme Court said in upholding a 1987 district court judgment. The district court ruled, and the Supreme Court agreed, that a homeschool was considered legitimate if parents used some sort of curriculum consisting of books, workbooks or other written materials and that they met “basic education goals” by teaching reading, spelling, grammar, mathematics, and good citizenship. Once that standard is met, the state’s authority ends, although the district court said state officials could ask homeschool parents about curricula and

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standardized tests to make sure home-taught students were being educated. The Supreme Court specifically said Wednesday, however, that the Texas Education Agency could request evidence of standardized tests, even though homeschool parents are not required to give such tests. “Our concern was that the state does have an interest in verifying that a student is being educated,” said T.E.A. spokesman Joey Lozano. “This gives some final clarity to that issue.” Lozano said the state would “give great weight to standardized tests in determining whether adequate homeschooling is being done.” Homeschool advocates say they are able to judge their children’s progress without standardized tests. “Most parents are in one way or another testing their kids,” said Gary Leeper of Arlington, who filed the original class-action lawsuit in 1985 after he and his wife, Cheryl, decided to educate two of their sons at home. “We weren’t worried about how they were doing in comparison to other kids so we didn’t use standardized tests.” Mrs. Leeper said homeschool advocates, however, “encourage each other to cooperate with truant officers. After all, they have a job to do, too.” The 1987 ruling made Texas the last state to legalize homeschooling, a practice that has grown steadily as confidence in the public school system has declined. Nearly 1 million families nationwide educate their children at home—100,000 of them in Texas. “I’m very pleased, of course,” Mrs. Leeper said Wednesday. “Chris and Brandon (her two adult homeschooled sons, now graduated) have really grown up with this case always in the background.” Texas law never intended to criminalize homeschooling, the court said in a ruling written by Justice Nathan Hecht. The 1915 law that required Texas children to go to school exempted those in private or parochial schools, but made no mention of homeschools. But in 1981, the T.E.A.’s staff attorney advised a school district that home schools were not exempt from the compulsory attendance law. That advice was strengthened the next year by the T.E.A.’s assistant general counsel, who told parents interested in homeschooling that “all of our legal

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research concludes that a person may not teach their children at home simply by calling their home a private school.” On Wednesday, the Supreme Court said “the fact remains that there is no evidence of such a policy prior to [the T.E.A. lawyer’s advice in] 1981.” In addition to allowing the T.E.A. to enforce the guidelines for homeschools, and to request standardized test scores, the court also said that any new rules on homeschools written by the State Board of Education would be subject to judicial review. The T.E.A., Lozano said, only appealed the district court ruling because it objected to the court’s requirement that the state pay $360,000 in attorneys’ fees for the plaintiffs. The Supreme Court upheld that portion of the ruling Wednesday as well, although Justice Raul Gonzalez dissented on that issue.

The Dallas Morning News, April 11, 1986 “4,000 Home School Backers Mass for State Rules Hearing” Terrence Stutz Austin—More than 4,000 homeschool parents and supporters urged the state Board of Education Thursday to back away from a proposed rule that would establish minimum standards for all private schools in Texas. In a politically charged public hearing that included critical comments from 16 state legislators, the state board heard more than four hours of testimony on the controversial rule, which will be voted on Saturday. Only about 1,000 of the parents and supporters who came to register their protests were allowed into the session at the LBJ Library Auditorium on the University of Texas campus. Others had to wait in the adjacent hallways and rooms and listen to the testimony over speakers. And still others attended a rally near the auditorium, where four candidates for governor drew cheers of support when they blasted the proposal and accused Gov. Mark White of trying to instigate state control of homeschools and religious schools. That accusation later prompted a sharp denial from board member Jack Strong of Longview, who chaired the public hearing. After one speaker warned the board not to “take the fall for Mark White,” Strong told the audience, “Gov. White has never had anything to do with this rule.”

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The Texas Education Agency proposed new standards in response to requests from school superintendents across the state. They have long complained that the state’s compulsory school attendance statute is too vague, allowing many parents to skirt the law. Current law permits a child to attend a private school, but does not define what a private school is. The original proposal was later softened by Strong. The new proposal would require private and homeschools to meet certain minimal standards. Among the gubernatorial candidates who spoke to the parents at the socalled Austin T.E.A. (Texas Education Agency) Party rally were Republicans Bill Clements of Dallas and Kent Hance of Lubbok. Clements called the proposal “another power grab” by a state agency that was “instigated by Gov. White and Attorney General Mattox.” Hance warned that the state board was exceeding its legal authority and could face a barrage of lawsuits if it adopts the rule. Democrats Andrew C. Briscoe III of Dallas and Bobby Locke of San Antonio also spoke against the proposal, and Republican Tom Loeffler sent a representative to voice his opposition. A majority of the 68 people who addressed the board, including the 16 legislators, opposed the rule, charging that it infringed on the basic freedoms of Texans. But several school officials from across the state urged the board to adopt the rule to help them get truant students in school. Humble schools Superintendent Michael Say said that of 15 recent cases in which district children were found to be staying at home instead of attending school, only four of those involved homeschool situations. The rest were cases where children were getting no education at all, he noted. “Our current laws are practically unenforceable,” he said, calling on the board to give local school officials clear guidelines on school attendance. Also calling for adoption of the rules were the Texas Association of School Boards, Texas Association of School Administrators and the Texas Federation of Teachers. Homeschool and Christian school groups, on the other hand, implored the board to drop the rules.

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“The state wants control of our children, and we find it very difficult to stand idly by and let this happen,” said Steve Riddell of Dallas, who identified himself as a homeschooler and youth minister of the Walnut Hill Church of Christ. Representatives of larger private and parochial schools, which have voluntarily complied with state standards for several years, said they would have no problem complying with the rules. Richard Daly of the Texas Catholic Conference told the board he believes the proposal “safeguards basic parental rights” and “is acceptable to us.” There are about 300 Catholic schools in Texas with an estimated 80,000 students. Several other Christian school educators told the board they would have no trouble meeting the standards, but many of them said they opposed the rules on philosophical grounds. Under the proposal, a private school would have to meet one of these standards: • If a school is approved by a private accrediting organization recognized by the state commissioner of education, the school does not have to meet any additional requirements. • Other schools can operate if their facilities meet health and safety codes; if they have a written curriculum that is comparable to accredited private schools; and if their students perform satisfactorily on a national achievement test. • An exception to the rules may be made if the school or homeschool parent can prove to the satisfaction of the local school district that their students are in an instructional program comparable to that of an accredited private school. The new rule differs significantly from the proposal recommended by the Texas Education Agency. That proposal would have required all teachers in private and homeschools to have a college degree. The plan also would have compelled the schools to have the same basic curriculum, school day and school year as a public school.

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NOTES 1. H. Reginald McDaniel, “Fate of Home, Private Schools at Stake at Austin Hearing,” Houston Chronicle, 9 April, 1986, 19A. 2. Terrence Stutz, “4,000 Home School Backers Mass For State Rules Hearing,” Dallas Morning News, 11 April 1985, 13A. The exact number of those attending the hearing, however, is disputed. In a 2002 publication of the Texas Home School Coalition Review, Tim Lambert, who was at the time the President of the Texas Home School Coalition, placed the numbers at 6,000. 3. Patricia Lines, “Home Instruction: The Size and Growth of the Movement,” in J. Van Galen and M. A. Pitman, eds., Home Schooling: Political, Historical, and Pedagogical Perspectives (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1991), 12. The numbers represent families that are registered with a state agency. Not all states, including Texas, require registration, which means that the numbers may be higher. 4. Lines’s quotation in Michael B. O’Connell, “Homeschooling: A Historical Inquiry” (Ph.D. diss., University of Saratoga, 1998), 88. See also offered statements by one homeschooling parent, Connie Pryzant, “School at Home: Forth ‘R’ is Religion for Many Who Educate Their Children on Their Own,” Dallas Morning News, 6 October 1984, 1A. 5. O’Connell, “Homeschooling,” 85. 6. Fundamentalists pledge allegiance to the basic or “fundamental” tenets of the Christian religion—viz., the inerrancy of scripture, the virgin birth, the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ after death, original sin, and the reality of miracles as presented in the New Testament. The origin and social base of fundamentalism in America can be traced back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Fundamentalists are often considered reactionaries, those who oppose different forms of economic, political, and religious liberalism or progressivism. The cultural aspect of fundamentalism has been the incessant call to take back America for Christ, which has motivated powerful political moves, and thus much of the fundamentalism shaping the contemporary right has focused on moral, not doctrinal, issues. Mark Noll, David Bebbington, and George Rawlyk proved a four-point definition of evangelicalism in their coedited work, Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1900: “Biblicism (a reliance on the Bible as the ultimate religious authority), conversionism (a stress on the New Birth), activism (an energetic, individualistic approach to religious duties and social involvement), and crucicentrism (a focus on Christ’s redeeming work as the heart of essential Christianity).” Evangelicalism, one of the most difficult religious terms to define, shares with fundamentalism a vaguely defined theology. But there is also a cultural dynamic: (1) the democratizing tendencies and thus the relegation of the institutional church; (2) the emphasis on mass politics; and (3) the place of consumerism in shaping the evangelical message. Finally, evangelicalism shares with fundamentalism a concern for moral issues. Confessional doctrine is not as important. 7. Brian D. Ray, Strengths of Their Own: Home Schoolers Across America (Salem, OR: NHERI Publications, 1997), 90. Vernon Bates, “Lobbying for the Lord: The New Christian Right Home Schooling Movement and Grassroots Lobbying,” in

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Melvin I. Urofsky and Martha Mays., eds., The New Christian Right: Political and Social Issues (NY: Garland Publishing, 1996). 8. Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 7. 9. Ibid., 47. For further studies on the paranoid style and status anxiety of the new right, see Daniel Bell, ed., The Radical Right (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publications, 2002). 10. Talcott Parsons, Political and Social Structure (NY: Free Press, 1969), 169. 11. Steve Bruce, The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Right: Conservative Politics in America, 1978–1988 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 7. 12. McGirr, 7. 13. Ibid., 15. 14. Bruce, 12–13. 15. J. Gary Knowles, Stacy Marlow, and James Muchmore, “From Pedagogy to Ideology: Origins and Phases of Home Education in the United States, 1970–1990” American Journal of Education (August 1991), 129. 16. Maralee Mayberry, “Characteristics and Attitudes of Families who Home School” Education and Urban Society. 17. Susan Warren, “Politicians Join Parents’ Rally in Favor of Home Schooling,” Houston Chronicle, 26 March 1986, 21. 18. The homeschool studies used and cited in this chapter—especially J. Gary Knowles, et al., and Stevens—all concur that it is wrong to think that children in a home school setting lack significant social maturity. As they argue, homeschool children appear to be more socially active than private and public school kids. Part of the reason for this has to do with the integrated nature of home education, which includes homeschooling coops. 19. Marion Ritter, “Read This Before You Veto Home-Education” American School Board Journal (October 1979): 38–40; in the American Journal of Education, Gary Knowles, Stacey Marlow, and James Muchmore site cases of the incarceration of parents for homeschooling their children. 20. Studies of homeschool families by Bates, Winters, and Knowles, et al., have shown that many parents were not politically active previous to the homeschool hearings in places like Oregon, Illinois, and Texas. 21. J. Gary Knowles, Stacy Marlow, and James Muchmore, “From Pedagogy to Ideology: Origins and Phases of Home Education in the United States, 1970–1990” American Journal of Education (August 1991): 124–34. 22. Marlene Anne Bumbarmer’s interview with John Holt in Anne Pedersen and Peggy O’Mara, eds., Mothering Magazine (Santa Fe, NM: John Muir Publications, 1981), 32–43. 23. Both ideologues and Pedagogues have provided a welter of homeschool textbooks. Consider Holt’s Teach Your Own, How Children Fail, How Children Learn, Illich’s Deschooling Society, Ray and Dorothy Moore’s Better Late Than Early, Samuel Blumenfeld’s Homeschooling, and R. J. Rushdoony’s Messianic Character of American Education. The works offered by the Ideologues are morally and theologically charged and appeal to the religious sentiments of a number of Christian homeschoolers. Both camps have also provided a number of support groups and research agencies: Brian D. Ray’s National Home Education Research Institute in

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Seattle; Raymond and Dorothy Moore’s the Moore Foundation in Washington; Pat Montgomery’s Clonlara School Home Based Education in Michigan; Greg Harris’s Christian Life Workshops in Oregon; R. J. Rushdoony’s Chalcedon Foundation; and J. Richard Fugate’s Alpha and Omega Publications in Arizona. Such agencies disseminated curricula materials as well as newsletters that keep parents informed of upcoming legislative acts. 24. Connie Pryzant, “School at Home: Fourth ‘R’ is Religion for Many Who Educate Their Children on Their Own,” Dallas Morning News, 6 October 1984, 1A. 25. Another important component of a Manichean mindset is its apocalyptic overtone. Fundamentalists since the 1920s have been concerned with the “last days” and the onset of the apocalypse. Such a message intensified immediately following World War II. Politicians like McCarthy were, in a sense, agents of this eschatological perspective; communism was the manifestation of the Beast described in the Revelations. For a further study of the relationship between fundamentalism and moments of apocalyptic outbursts read George Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (NY: Oxford University Press, 1980). 26. For more information on the collapse of the New Christian Right, see Bruce, 189. 27. H. Reginald McDaniel, “Fate of Home, Private Schools at Stake in Austin Hearing,” Houston Chronicle, 9 April 1986, 19A. 28. James E. Barlow, “Schooling at Home: Beliefs Often at Heart of Schools Issue” Houston Chronicle, 29 December 1986, 1A. 29. Stevens, 73. 30. Deborah Hurst, “State’s actions could put home schooling in corner,” Houston Chronicle, 10 April 1986, 12. 31. Dallas Morning News, 11 April 1986. 32. Margaret Ann Latus, “Ideological PACS and Political Action,” 75–103 in Robert C. Liebman and Robert Wuthnow, eds., The New Christian Right (NY: Aldine Publishing), 1983. Sociologists Susan Rose and Alan Peshkin examine different private religious schools and highlight their underlying social and ideological tenets. Rose’s analysis focuses on class status and religious practice. Working class charismatics appear to be more concerned with social conditions and the surrounding material environment than middle class fundamentalists. Peshkin, on the other hand, employs a term called “total institution” to describe private religious schools. Private school administrators and teachers seek to regulate students’ social and domestic life, hoping to inculcate on their minds the idea that they are constantly being watched. See Rose’s Keeping Them Out of the Hands of Satan: Evangelical Schooling in America (NY: Routledge, 1988) and Peshkin’s God’s Choice: The Total World of a Fundamentalist Christian School (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1986). 33. Vernon L. Bates, “Lobbying for the Lord: The New Christian Right Home Schooling Movement and Grassroots Lobbying,” in Melvin I. Urofsky and Martha May, eds., The New Christian Right: Political and Social Issues (NY: Garland Publishing, 1996), 182. 34. Ibid. 35. Mitchell Stevens, Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschool Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 54.

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36. People v. Nobel, no. S791—0114—A, S791—0115, Allegan County District Court, Michigan (1979). After being tried for homeschooling, a mother earned a bachelor’s degree in special education, but refused for religious reasons to obtain a state teaching certificate. She based her defense to educate at home on the first amendment’s free exercise clause. 37. Stevens, 75. 38. Beverly LaHaye, “What Women With Their Husbands Knew About Leadership,” Christian Herald (November/December 1990), 21–22. 39. Ibid., 22. 40. Billings quotation in Bruce Baron, Heaven on Earth?: The Social and Political Agendas of Dominion Theology (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing, 1992), 1. 41. Joseph Conn, “Trouble in Texas: How the Christian Right Seized Control of the Houston GOP,” Church and State (February 1993), 11–12. 42. Farrington v. Tokushige, 273 U.S. 284 (1927). 43. Knowles et al., 210. 44. Pierce decision quoted in Knowles, 210. 45. Ibid., 212. 46. Susan Warren, “Politicians Join Parents’ Rally in Favor of Home Schooling,” Houston Chronicle, 26 March 1986, 21. 47. Michael Farris continues in the area of education. He is founding president, now chancellor, of Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia. PHC is one of the nation’s leading conservative institutions of higher learning. 48. Dallas Morning News, 6 October 1984. 49. Dallas Morning News, 11 April 1986, 13A. 50. Texas Education Agency et al., v. Leeper et al. Court of Appeals of Texas, Second District, Fort Worth, 843 S.W. 2d 41 (November 27, 1991). See also Supreme Court decision: 893 S.W. 2d 432, Tex Sup. J 968, (June 15, 1994). See also Wendy Benjamin, “Home schools win court fight: Ruling backs parents’ right to teach their own children,” Houston Chronicle 16 June 1994, 1A and A. Philips Brooks, “High court rules agency cannot regulate home,” Austin AmericanStatesman 16 June 1994, 2. 51. Bates, “Lobbying for the Lord,” 181. 52. Ibid. 53. A. Philips Brooks, “High court rules state agency cannot regulate home,” Austin American-Statesman, 16 June 1994, 1A. 54. Ibid. 55. Wendy Benjamin, “Home Schools Win Court Fight: Ruling Backs Parents’ Right to Teach Their Own Children,” Houston Chronicle, 16 June 1994, 1A. 56. Tim Lambert, “Review From the President,” Texas Home School Coalition Review (November 2000), 4, 8.

11 ✛

Changing Visions for Jesuit High Schools in America: The Case of Campion Jesuit High School, 1965–1975 Casey C. Beaumier

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ne cannot examine concepts of separation and equality within American education without considering the situation of Catholic schooling. The Catholic Church in America is remarkable in that it established an enormous educational system based on its perception and experience of unequal treatment for Catholics in the common school system that existed early in the nation’s beginning. The massive expansion of the Catholic school movement emerged in the United States as a response to religious bias in the New York City schools against Roman Catholics, particularly toward the nation’s new poor Catholic immigrants. John Hughes, New York’s archbishop, addressed the tension on August 10, 1840. Hughes criticized the Public School Society of New York for its promotion of anti-Catholic sentiment within public school classrooms. With the large number of newly arrived immigrants crowding the city and negative reaction to their settlement in the city, many immigrant families decided to keep their Catholic children away from what they perceived to be hostile, anti-Catholic public school classrooms. For example, Hughes objected to the forced reading of the King James Version of the Bible, and the use of books that contained “false (as we believe) historical statements respecting the men and things of past times calculated to fill the minds of our children with errors of

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fact, and at the same time to excite in them prejudice against the religion of their parents and guardians.”1 Hughes longed for public schools that had been established “on a principle which would have secured a perfect NEUTRALITY of influence on the subject of religion, then we should have no reason to complain. But this has not been done, and we respectfully submit that it is impossible.”2 With the advocacy of then-New York Governor William Seward, Hughes would prove instrumental in the 1841 state legislature elections that led to the defeat of the Public School Society. Yet in the eyes of the Catholic hierarchy, there remained tremendous challenges for Catholic children in the public school classroom as they continued to negotiate the tensions between American and Catholic identities. As the Catholic Church expanded in the United States, its bishops prepared greater organizational structures to help its rapidly growing membership. At the First Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1852, these bishops began to investigate the promotion of a Catholic school system. The hope to educate young Catholics within church structures remained strong so that by the bishops’ Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884 they firmly declared a desire for “every Catholic child in the land” to have “the benefit of a Catholic school.”3 Parishes across the country sought to establish schools, and thousands of these parochial institutions did develop, although by far the majority of Catholic youth continued to be educated in the public school system. For new parishes, the school building was often erected before the actual church structure was even established, so highly regarded and prioritized was the education of the church’s youngest members. This system expanded and succeeded rapidly and effectively because of its dependence upon the generous service of thousands of dedicated religious women. Catholic nuns served as both teachers and administrators in most of the parish-based primary schools. Students would then move onto secondary schools that were sponsored by Catholic religious orders and dioceses. Some would eventually move into the growing system of Catholic higher education. What emerged was an entire educational system based on separation. The original intention behind this educational division was to facilitate the opportunity for Catholic American youth to receive an education equal to that of their American counterparts while at the same time being formed within the Catholic religious community. One of the Catholic religious orders that contributed greatly on both secondary and higher education levels was the Society of Jesus. In almost every major urban center in the United States there was a Jesuit high school and college. The high schools provided single-sex education for boys, the same for the colleges and universities, although they would eventually become coeducational.

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One of the secondary schools operated by the Society of Jesus was Campion Jesuit High School. This chapter considers Campion as one example of Catholic education in the United States, arguing that Catholic schools like Campion desired to separate Catholic Americans in order to provide them with an educational and religious context that the public education system would not. Eventually, these schools became very successful and then, in the midst of the volatile 1960s, faced pressure to inclusively embrace those in America who, though not necessarily Catholic, were treated in an unequal way within American culture, similar to the exclusion faced by earlier Catholic generations. However, within school populations of faculty, students, and alumni, there was fierce resistance to this pressure to adapt, motivated by a fear that comprising Catholic elitism in the name of inclusivity, would cause some of the schools, including Campion, to collapse. In the mid 1960s they came from all over the United States, as well as Canada, Chile, Saudi Arabia, Korea, and the Philippines, hoping to benefit from an excellent Jesuit education. In August, with a year’s worth of clothing and supplies packed in suitcases and trunks, boys flocked to Campion Jesuit High School, centrally located 178 miles west of Milwaukee, 240 miles northwest of Chicago, and 200 miles southeast of Minneapolis. Campion was nestled in beautiful Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, a small town surrounded by verdant bluffs at the confluence of the Mississippi and Wisconsin Rivers, a perfectly peaceful environment for the serious intellectual and character formation of boys. Parents would bring their sons by car, or the boys would arrive easily by Burlington Vista-Dome Zephyr passenger trains, which had a special stop right at the 108-acre campus. The impressive boarding school consisted of buildings both historic—the original Lawler Hall served as a hospital for Civil War veterans—and new—the Hoffman Athletic Center boasted an indoor pool. Upon their arrival the boys were greeted by the large community of 40 Jesuits, dressed in black cassocks, many of whom were assigned to one of several dorms where some of the Jesuits lived in order to be readily available for the students. At this moment in the school’s history, Campion was at its high point. The total enrollment of 590 students for 1965 was as impressive as the previous year’s all-time school record of 598. Administrators were enthusiastic as they pondered future grand plans in anticipation of Campion’s 1980 centennial celebration. However, the hopeful vision for Campion’s second century grew to become obscure and cloudy with the advance of time. No one could have foreseen the effects upon Campion that accompanied unprecedented historical events like the Society of Jesus’ 31st General Congregation, the Roman Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council, and the social upheaval that took place in the United States in the

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1960s and 1970s, particularly with regard to racial equality and the role of authority figures. Each of these ecclesial and national landmarks created ripple effects that required rapid adaptation at a place like Campion in order to meet the changing cultural and religious landscapes that emerged. Campion’s administration adopted significant, sweeping changes for the school that contributed to its becoming entangled in a complex web of institutional challenges. However, the sheer amount of change, along with the style and pace of its implementation, had the unforeseen and unintended consequence of dismantling the school’s culture and reputation in a very short period of time, leading to its complete demise in 1975. Yet for students at Campion in 1965, the new academic year revealed myriad opportunities to learn and live together, and to shed their boyhood and morph into Campion men. For decades, trusting parents agreed to “Give Campion a Boy and Get Back a Man,” as the school’s slogan assured. They were not disappointed with the resulting outcome, and the school prided itself both on the lofty goals of its student formation plan and the success of its alumni over the years—like sportsman Charles Comiskey, actor George Wendt (the character, Norm, from the television series, Cheers), historian Garry Wills, and Mexico’s President Vicente Fox. The students passed their time on a campus that more resembled a college than a high school; it was simply fabulous. There was abundant space and plenty of activity to keep a young man interested and occupied for the four years he was in residence at Campion. The facilities were quite impressive, along with the academic and athletic programs. Everything about Campion—environmental beauty, intense discipline, rigorous academics, and successful athletics—was at the service of its Catholic identity. The Campion of 1965 was content with both its academic reputation and its religious identity. It anticipated smooth, predictable growth into a future that would be a continuation of its proud and confident past of educating Catholic boys with the aim of forming them into generous, successful Catholic gentlemen who would live their lives for both God and country. The desire for earlier generations of Catholics to separate themselves in order to provide an intellectual formation for their children that valued the place of religion seemed to have borne tremendous fruit when one considered a thriving institution like Campion. The school had an intellectual, cultural, religious, and social depth to it that was quite attractive. At the same time, the very separation that produced success also produced challenging consequences for the later generations of Campion students, parents, and faculty. The negative side effect of separation was the risk of becoming insular in one’s outlook and experience of the world. Yet, in order to protect its unique identity and established success, Campion administrators felt the need to maintain separation.

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This division moved beyond the religious dimension of the school and seemed to intersect with other social dimensions, including race. For example, on September 21, 1945, Mrs. Samuel Byron Milton, a Catholic African American woman from River Rouge, Michigan, wrote to Campion administrators requesting an application for her son Byron, who would soon finish grade school at Our Lady of Lourdes, the local parochial school. Although Byron Milton would not graduate from the eighth grade until 1946, Mrs. Milton was already anticipating her son’s future and believed he would benefit from a more rigorous Catholic boarding school educational experience and hoped that he might be admitted to Campion in the fall of 1946. Mrs. Milton had a Jesuit advocate in Detroit, Father J. E. Coogan, who was working with the Detroit Catholic Women’s Interracial Council. It was he who suggested she find a Jesuit boarding school for her son. On October 16, 1945, Father Coogan wrote to Father Thomas Stemper, S.J., Campion’s rector-president, and recommended Byron Milton for admission. In this letter, Coogan informed Stemper of the boy’s race, which until this moment was unknown by Campion.4 Twelve days after Coogan wrote to the school, Father Thomas E. Kelly, S.J., Campion’s director of registration, wrote to Mrs. Milton and advised Byron remain at Our Lady of Lourdes for high school. Kelly noted that “a private school such as ours obtains its enrollment from families whose fathers, sons, and other relatives have traditionally sought their education here. Our first obligations are to these.”5 After graduating from the Lourdes Elementary in 1946, Byron Milton did begin his high school studies at Lourdes. Mrs. Milton again wrote to Campion, on February 5, 1947. In her letter she noted that even though Byron had applied earlier and was rejected, it was her hope that he might be admitted as a transfer student. On February 13, 1947, Father J. P. Kramper, S.J., the new director of admissions, wrote that he would not be able to respond immediately to her request but that she would receive a response soon.6 It was not until April 11, 1947 that he wrote, rejecting Byron a second time, noting that the arrival at this decision was difficult for the board of admission. The principal reason for the rejection was that Campion simply was not ready to admit an African American student. “If we change our traditional policy too soon, the opportunity to open the door to lads of Byron’s race will be set back many, many years. Be assured, Mrs. Milton, that this decision was arrived at only after many prayers had been said for guidance.” 7 On May 22, 1965 a Spaniard named Pedro Arrupe was elected by the Jesuits’ 31st General Congregation to lead the Society of Jesus as its 29th Superior General, the priest who was charged with the governance of the religious order throughout the entire world. In addition to electing a new general, the Congregation issued several decrees, including one concerning

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“The Better Choice and Promotion of Ministries.” This document addressed Jesuit institutions like Campion that were perceived as having resisted cultural adaptation over the years and therefore, in need of change, an echo of the Second Vatican Council’s call for aggiornamento, or “updating.” That the 31st General Congregation occurred within the time of Vatican II was coincidental. Pope John XXIII called the Vatican Council, which opened on October 11, 1962. Arrupe’s predecessor, Jesuit General John Baptist Janssens, died on October 5, 1965 and the Society had to call a congregation in order to elect a new general. The congregation was especially influenced by the timing of the Vatican Council’s December 1965 decree, Gaudium et Spes, “The Church in the Modern World,” which envisioned a Catholic Church that “always had the duty of scrutinizing the signs of the time and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel.” The church was to “recognize and understand the world in which we live, its explanation, its longings, and its often dramatic characteristics.”8 The receptivity to and the affirmation of the world in Gaudium et Spes influenced the Society’s work as it formulated its own decrees. With regard to Jesuit schools, the congregation recommended “new forms of this [educational] apostolate, particularly adapted to the present age, and we should energetically investigate or fashion these new forms.”9 As a charismatic leader responding to the directives of the Second Vatican Council on the renewal of religious life within the Catholic Church, Arrupe aimed to update the Society of Jesus, urging Jesuits not to be “dismayed or discouraged at our own deep need for revitalization . . . where we have been relying excessively on external supports—detailed rules, rigidly fixed daily schedules, special kinds of dress, and the like—we may now feel exposed to and shivering in the wind of freedom and bewildered by calls for authenticity and personal decision-making.”10 A renewed Society, free from the past external supports of detailed regulation, would encounter youthful vigor as it progressed along a new path, guided by the Spirit as it progressed in time. Regarded by many Jesuits as a second founder of the Society of Jesus, Arrupe’s vision seemed to suggest among some Jesuits that preference for the poor outweighed outreach to the elite, a ministerial strategy articulated by Ignatius Loyola, the Spaniard who founded the Jesuits in 1540. Ignatius believed that spiritual aid which was given to important and public persons ought to be regarded as of great importance for the Society’s ministries. Arrupe reminded his Jesuits that they were founded for the service of God through the service of humanity, a faith that does justice with a preferential option for the poor, and that ultimately the Society was called to “discover, at each instant of time, each new encounter with the changing world, how it can best adapt and harness itself to man’s needs.”11 Adaptation, then, was the key to his understanding of the world and its impact upon the Society. The kind of

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encounter with the world that Arrupe was envisioning for Jesuit schools required a scrutiny of elite separation from the world that many of them employed in their foundations. It was with this new leadership within the Jesuits that Campion administrators began to transform the school. The banner headline of the Campion’ette, the student newspaper, likely caught the eyes of students arriving on campus in the fall of 1966. It proclaimed “The Big Change,” which was actually a collection of changes that when taken as a whole, seemed to have had the effect of radically transforming the school’s student culture in a single moment. In addition to introducing the new rector-president, Father Robert Hilbert, S.J., the article noted with enthusiasm and wonder that “the biggest surprise upon the students’ arrival was the number of rule changes. There were to be voluntary Mass, Bermuda shorts, and no censorship of mail.”12 Jesuit Larry Gillick observed how likely it was that “many a Jesuit turned in his grave when he heard of the new Campion. If these changes weren’t introduced, Campion too would be dead, and forever turning in its grave.”13 Besides Hilbert and Gillick, eleven other new Jesuits joined the Campion faculty and staff in the fall of 1966. This was a substantial change in the Jesuit community membership, meant to assist in the implementation of the many transitions on campus. Hilbert articulated the difference he hoped Campion students would experience. “If people are concentrating too much on a regulation just as a regulation, it can interfere in achieving what the rule is supposed to do.”14 Simply put, the big change was that freedom, not discipline, was now the lens through which the school envisioned the formation of the Campion man. Perhaps the greatest change, however, did not involve any aspect of the school already in place but was found instead in new student recruitment. For the very first time Campion began to recruit and admit African American boys to its student body, a twofold response to the Civil Rights Movement and the Jesuit mandate that Campion update itself. Pedro Arrupe had voiced his desire for the Jesuits to become more accountable to interracial ministry, and he instructed schools to “make increased efforts to encourage the enrollment of qualified Negroes, and the establishment of special programs to assist disadvantaged Negroes to meet admission standards; special scholarship funds and other financial assistance should be solicited for this purpose.”15 One of the four African Americans who began studies that year was a junior transfer student from Saint Louis named Hal Brooks. He became known for the controversial poem he published in the Campion’ette, “To Pig With Love,” concerning the December 4, 1969 shooting deaths in Chicago of Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. At issue was the poem’s content, which many deemed to be both threatening and obscene as it called for black revolution against whites, especially the police.16 The

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December 22, 1969 headline in the Dubuque Telegraph-Herald proclaimed “Black’s Poem Brings Racial Tension to Campion.” Alumni, parents, and friends subscribed to the Campion’ette, so word of the controversial poem spread quickly and passionately. For many of them, the poem took on a symbolic role of everything that was going wrong with the school. Most shocking in their eyes was that President Hilbert defended Brooks’ poem in the same Dubuque Telegraph-Herald article as a “dignified, honest piece of literature,” and observed that the style was an accepted literary form in African American culture. He defended all of the African American students at Campion, which he described as “a white racist school in a white racist society.” Five days after the poem was published, Hilbert sent a five-page letter to Campion parents, originally intended to serve as the school’s annual Christmas greeting, but instead focused on the difficulties and challenges of those recent days after the publication of “To Pig With Love.” In his letter he revealed that numerous fights and threats had occurred on campus and that significant divisions had developed among the students. Several anonymous threatening notes were placed under the bedroom doors of African American students or posted on common bulletin boards in the residence halls, presumably by white students. Sensing the escalating polarization, Hilbert appealed to Christian reconciliation, reminding those affiliated with Campion of the basic Christian teaching of love of neighbor, an understanding that he believed had failed because of the tensions at the school. He observed how “the racial situation brings out very sharply that we here at Campion . . . have failed for years to get across the most basic tenet of Christianity, that we absolutely must learn to love other men, even our enemies, as brothers.”17 Throughout the ordeal there was tremendous pressure placed upon Hilbert, who struggled to maintain his leadership while at the same time telling the Telegraph Herald, “If my position closes the school, it closes the school.” He eventually stepped down from the presidency at Campion in 1970 but remained the rector of the Jesuit community until 1973. Campion alumnus Father Greg Lucey, from the class of 1951, was named president in 1970 at the young age of thirty-eight. The poem was simply an indicator of a much greater tension developing within Campion. In a December 13, 1971 memo written to the school’s teachers, Lucey addressed a faculty that had become fundamentally and irreconcilably divided. Some were advocating even greater change to the school’s identity; opining that Campion had not gone far enough in its transformation from an insular Catholic boarding school into one that was more inclusive and diverse. What they perceived to be a rigid discipline system and exclusive boarding school identity was out of touch with the changing world, and no longer served the greater good. These faculty members wanted to de-school Campion, and seemed to echo the

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conclusions of contemporary writers of education like Ivan Illich and A. S. Neill. In his 1970 Deschooling Society, Illich criticized religious schools as being socially divisive. In his view of education, “the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence.”18 Tremendously influential for these teachers was the boarding school model of the Summerhill School in England. They valued the insights of Summerhill’s founder, A. S. Neill, who believed that “the discipline of an army is aimed at making for efficiency in fighting. All such discipline subordinates the individual to the cause . . . in a happy family, discipline usually looks after itself. Life is pleasant give and take. Parents and children are chums, coworkers.19 In the words of one of Campion’s Jesuit faculty members: “Some of us want to turn out radical Christians here at Campion. We want to have courage to become such ourselves. Others want to turn out well and nicely mannered Catholic gentlemen.”20 This position was in sharp contrast to others who held that Campion was losing its identity as a school where parents could send their sons to a place removed from the distractions of the wider world where they could receive a traditional, excellent Catholic education. Lucey found himself in the challenging if not impossible position of trying to articulate a vision for Campion that everyone could support. He questioned whether there was “sufficient commitment to Campion and the people who make it up to enable us to hammer out a philosophy that all will agree to live by.”21 Of great concern to him was the need for Campion to have a “philosophy” of education. The past years of experimentation brought to the school many styles of teaching with many different outcomes, to the point that there was growing confusion about the kind of young man Campion aspired to form. Some in the school community looked to the president to clarify the educational direction in which Campion was to move; others longed for even greater decentralization of the school’s vision in order to serve better the diverse formational needs of each individual student at Campion. These competing and conflicting desires among the faculty produced the tension Lucey longed to resolve. It was no easy time to be a leader, for leadership was viewed with suspicion, yet he recognized that the task of articulating a vision for the school fell upon the president. “I feel there are so many areas needing attention, I find it impossible to cover all at this time. I do not feel my position is perfectly clear even to me.”22 The problem of articulating a “philosophy” for the school had been an ongoing tension dating back to 1966, when Campion began to experiment with its curriculum and institutional identity. Then-president Hilbert wondered whether to plan for Campion to continue as “a good college prep school of a fairly traditional and conservative approach,” or “to change radically our operational self-concept—that is, that we attempt to

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do a bit of pioneering instead of waiting for others to do the initial experimentation and testing. Such a course would require a great deal of imagination and courage, and would run great risk of failure.”23 Hilbert considered the 31st General Congregation’s request to investigate new forms of the educational apostolate, and thus enabled individual faculty members to conduct experiments in the residence hall system, the classrooms, and the chapel. This freedom to try different approaches produced a certain ethos within the Campion faculty where each teacher and each prefect felt entitled to autonomous jurisdiction over his own area. Interestingly, in his early years as principal, Lucey encouraged the continuation of Hilbert’s vision. He described for parents how Campion was “attempting to individualize instruction and to develop teaching techniques to help us cope with the explosion of knowledge. We are guiding your idealistic young sons as they challenge the values of yesterday and seek valid, Christian priorities for tomorrow.”24 Campion students became confused and disillusioned with the school, likely because of the palpable tensions they witnessed among their teachers and administration. Some faculty members expressed concern with “boys who drift off, not seeing any adult for long periods of time.”25 In 1968 Campion, along with other Jesuit high schools, participated in the Fichter Survey, a study of Christian formation of American Jesuit high school freshmen and seniors administered by Jesuit Joseph H. Fichter, the Stillman Professor at Harvard Divinity School and commissioned by the Jesuit Education Association. One of the survey’s findings revealed that as they grew at Campion, by far the majority of seniors believed that Campion did very little or nothing at all to help them foster a greater love of God. Seventy-one percent said they received Holy Communion much less than before they arrived at the school and almost a quarter felt that teachers had taken very little interest in them as students.26 In his concluding generalizations and speculations, Fichter wondered whether “perhaps the time has come to demythologize the religious ideology of Jesuit education and to re-assess the whole concept of the impact of religion on character training.”27 In academic year 1974–1975 there were only 293 students at Campion, a fifty percent drop in enrollment from 1965: 76 freshmen, 85 sophomores, 72 juniors, and 60 seniors. Of that total, 30 were African Americans, a very new population for the school. Notably, the upperclassmen were fewest in number, suggesting a very high rate of attrition, for the longer a young man attended Campion, the more likely it was that he would withdraw. Different factors contributed to the decline in Campion’s enrollment. One of the more obvious was that it simply was no longer easy to get to Prairie du Chien. Gone were the Burlington Zephyrs that made special stops on the campus. The shift in national transportation away from trains

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meant that the school was now dependent upon chartered buses to move students to and from campus, an organizational task often burdensome and complex for the school. One of the more complex factors contributing to enrollment decline was the tremendous loss of confidence among the school’s alumni and parents. While some supported the changes at Campion, many were very unhappy with the Campion’s direction. Major questions about the school’s religious commitment and elite identity surfaced, as did criticism of the academic program. Not only were the numbers of students down, but so too was the total membership of the Jesuit community—and significantly so. This decline contributed to the overall decrease in adult presence at the school. In the fall semester of 1975 a Jesuit faculty of only eight scholastics and nine priests, assisted by twelve laymen, met the students as they arrived. The smaller numbers of both Jesuits had a dramatic effect upon the school culture, especially the residential program. For example, students no longer lived in Marquette Hall: it was an empty building used on occasion by groups of young women who would come to the school as guests for weekend visits. Generally speaking, the campus was simply too large to support such few people, and the decreased number of Jesuits meant fewer Jesuit prefects in the halls, which meant less supervision and formation of the students. Additionally, there continued to be considerable confusion and disagreement regarding the identity of the school, which was obvious from the lack of promotional literature on Campion and its purpose. Without a clear aim, students were at a loss as they strove to recognize the traditional goal of their high school formation: becoming Campion men. The large billboard outside the school grounds near the highway had been vandalized by graffiti to read, “Give Campion a Boy, Get Back a Maniac,” and there was truth to the altered slogan, given the sheer amount of change and the chaos and confusion that accompanied it. The tensions among the faculty members regarding the competing and conflicting formational goals of the Campion gentleman and the Campion radical Christian were not easily borne by the school. A study of the daily announcements from the final two years reveals a deterioration of community spirit and cohesion. Vandalism, thefts, and fighting harmed morale of both students and teachers and occurred with greater and alarming frequency. Discipline came to be seen as a major restriction of one’s freedom, and regulations continued to soften, given the belief that free students would be respectful of the community and that mutual respect would prevent inappropriate behavior from ruling the community. Practically all structures from the past were removed in order to facilitate best this freedom. Archived notes from an evening gathering of conversation among Jesuit faculty members reveal growing tensions regarding

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the lack of discipline in the school, both for students and for faculty. One teacher stated that Campion had “so decentralized authority that we are a school without a personality. We don’t feel that we can show our feelings in making demands, stating our reasons and insisting that students act accordingly. We don’t come out strong enough for what we think.”28 Perhaps most telling of a lost and wandering Campion was its football program, which ended the 1974–1975 season with a record of zero wins and eight losses. Father Karl Voelker of Campion’s theology department explained how Jesuits and lay faculty members were leaving because of disillusionment. He stated that “in the hearts of our faculty, let us face it, Campion has no future. Unless our hearts are changed.” In his mind, the administration needed to declare the school dead, and from there would be two remaining options for the school, the first being to “give Campion a dignified funeral and to declare 1976 Campion’s final year.” The other was to “create a new vision that will rekindle hope and desire in the remaining faculty and attract new people.”29 In December of 1974 in Milwaukee, a Jesuit-appointed task force gathered to evaluate the school. It concluded that the philosophy of the school “must be clearly stated as much for holding and attracting manpower as for raising funds.” In order to survive, it recommended Campion attract Jesuits from other provinces, as well as religious men and women from other Catholic communities.30 The Task Force’s recommendations were fruitless and four months later it recommended to the Jesuit provincial that Campion close its doors forever. Back in Prairie du Chien, the Jesuit community gathered on March 28th and learned of the provincial’s decision to close Campion. It was Good Friday. The reaction to Campion’s demise was mixed. For some the decision brought relief while for others, there was much resentment and anger. In his letter to the Jesuits of the Wisconsin Province, Provincial Bruce Biever, S.J., encouraged his men to recall the good that Campion did for the Church and Society over the years and that in God’s plans, “our work there has been completed. Heart-wrenching as that realization is, I, as you, must accept that fact as His will.”31 In an April 10, 1975 letter announcing the closure to fellow alumni, President Lucey cited a lack of demand for residential secondary education, a decline in Jesuit manpower, and financial hardship as reasons for the school’s closure. After Campion’s final commencement in May, the property was put on the market, where it remained for three years for lack of a buyer. It finally sold in 1978 for $2.8 million to the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, when it became Martin Luther Preparatory, a coeducational boarding

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school. The funds from the sale of Campion were invested and a Campion Endowment Fund was established. Interest from the principle continues to be given each year for scholarships among the three Jesuit high schools in the Upper Midwest. The WELS operated the school until 1995 when it was closed and then sold to the state of Wisconsin in order to become the Prairie du Chien Correctional Institution, a juvenile prison for teenage boys. In his study of the intersection of Catholics and race in the urban northern United States, historian John McGreevy summarizes American Catholic parish life in the twentieth century. “The language with which Catholics spoke of ‘races’ within the church, the persistent vision of the world as a series of geographical and racial enclaves, and the scale of the enormous churches, schools, convents, and rectories testified to a Catholic sensibility at odds with the population movements of twentieth-century America.”32 Two views of Catholic reality emerged from this vision: tightly-knit homogenous versus widely diverse Catholic communities.33 The tightly-knit communal experience speaks to the absolute value that Catholics placed upon separation within parishes and, in the same way, Catholic schools. This separation originally came from the need to protect and promote the identity of a persecuted minority Catholic population within a hostile majority. However, as Catholics established themselves among the elite in the United States, the strong institutions they created transformed the inequality experienced among earlier generations. This included the many schools that provided a superb education for the church’s future generations. Such positive development called into question the legitimacy the legacy of the need for absolute religious separation. This is clearly the case with a school like Campion. In his concluding commentary on the survey he facilitated for the Jesuit Education Association, Joseph Fichter observed that most of the students in a Jesuit high school were coming from “well advantaged families, decidedly above the American average and representing what might be called the Catholic bourgeoisie. What we have clearly demonstrated in these surveys is that attendance at a Jesuit high school promotes and reinforces the social attitudes of this class of people.”34 In response, Campion’s leadership implemented the decrees of Vatican II and the 31st General Congregation. The resulting resistance to the changes to the student body and the school’s identity might suggest the school’s incompatibility with the future of Jesuit education. Yet there was no consideration of the need to contextualize the implementation of these new norms for a rural boarding school. Perhaps the administration’s abrupt change of vision made Campion a casualty of change.

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QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER 1) What was the initial purpose of a parochial education at a Catholic secondary school like Campion? How does this differ from other educational institutions covered in previous chapters?

2) Using the documents provided, discuss the assumptions that guided the Jesuits’ mission.

3) What assumptions do educators make about society, the economy, politics, race, and ethnicity?

4) Compare the rise and popularity of Roman Catholic schools to other religious institutions over the last two centuries. What patterns can be identified? What generalizations can be made about American society during times of growth in parochial education? What contributes to a decline in popularity of these schools? Does this change over time?

h IN THEIR WORDS Austin Flannery, Editor. Vatican Council II. Northport, NY: Constello Publishing Co., 1988. Vatican II Document on Christian Education, Gravissimum Edeucationis. October 28, 1965 Methods of education and instruction are being developed by new experiments, and great efforts are being made to provide these services for all men, although many children and young people are still without even elementary education, and many others are deprived of a suitable education—one inculcating simultaneously truth and charity” (Preface, 726). Documents of the 31st and 32nd General Congregations of the Society of Jesus. St. Louis, MO: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1977. Documents of the 31st and 32nd General Congregations of the Society of Jesus Decree 21: The Better Choice and Promotion of Ministries

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While the 31st General Congregation recognized the hard work that our Society puts into its apostolic ministries, at the same time it notes that our labors have not produced all the results that we could rightly expect, if one considers the proportion between the efforts and the results achieved. Part of the reason for this is our failure at times continually to renew our apostolic or missionary spirit and to maintain the union which the instrument should have with God, or our neglect of “moderation in labors of soul and body’ or a too great scattering of our forces; but the principal reason is our failure adequately to adapt our ministries to the changed conditions of our times” (Paragraph 1, 191).

h NOTES 1. John Hughes, Bishop of New York. “Address of the Catholics to their Fellow Citizens of the City and State of New York,” 10 August 1840. Public Voices: Catholics in the American Context. Steve M. Avella and Elizabeth McKeown, editors. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), 27–28. 2. Ibid., 28. 3. James Hennessey, American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 109. 4. Black Student Not Accepted Correspondence 1945–1947, Box 9, Campion Collection, Midwest Jesuit Archives, Saint Louis, MO. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Austin Flannery, O.P., “Gaudium et Spes,” Vatican Council II, (Northport, NY: Costolleo Publishing Co., Inc., 1987), 905. 9. “Decree 21: The Better Choice and Promotion of Ministries,” Documents of the 31st and 32nd General Congregations of the Society of Jesus, (Saint Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1977), 191. 10. Pedro Arrupe, “Jesuits and Education,” A Planet to Heal, (Rome: International Center for Jesuit Education, 1977), 245–246. 11. Pedro Arrupe, “The Challenge of the World and the Mission of the Society.” A Planet to Heal, (Rome: International Center for Jesuit Education, 1977), 306. 12. The Campion’ette, vol. 52, no. 1, October 1, 1966, page 1, Campion Collection, Midwest Jesuit Archives. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Pedro Arrupe. “A Letter on the Interracial Apostolate to the Fathers, Scholastics, and Brothers of the American Assistancy.” (Rome: November 1, 1967), 15. 16. The Campion’ette, vol. 55, no. 5, December, 13, 1969, page 1, Campion Collection, Midwest Jesuit Archives.

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17. The Poem Controversy Correspondence 1969, Box 9, Campion Collection, Midwest Jesuit Archives. 18. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Marion Boyars Publishers, Ltd., 1970), 1. 19. A. S. Neill, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, (New York: Hart Publishing Company, 1960), 156–157. 20. James “Sarge” O’Connor, S.J., to Provincial, February 19, 1971, Campion Collection, Midwest Jesuit Archives. 21. Greg Lucey, S.J., The Dilemma Memo, 13 December 1971, School Policy Committee 1971, Box 7, Campion Collection, Midwest Jesuit Archives. 22. Greg Lucey, S.J., Statement of the President, January 4, 1972, School Policy Committee 1972 Folder, Box 7, Campion Collection, Midwest Jesuit Archives. 23. Robert Hilbert, S.J., Our Philosophy of Education 1966, School Policy Committee 1966 Folder, Box 7, Campion Collection, Midwest Jesuit Archives. 24. Greg Lucey to Parents, December 1969, History ‘The Poem’ Controversy Correspondence 1969, Box 9, Campion Collection, Midwest Jesuit Archives. 25. Notes from Faculty Meeting Before Christmas, 1971, School Policy Committee Meetings and Minutes 1972, Box 7, Campion Collection, Midwest Jesuit Archives. 26. Fichter Survey Results, 1968, Box 7, Campion Collection, Midwest Jesuit Archives. 27. Joseph H. Fichter, Jesuit High Schools Revisited, (Washington, D.C.: Jesuit Educational Association, 1969), 182. 28. Saturday Night on the Hill, 11 March 1972, The Future of Campion—Various Opinions Collected by Sylvester Staber, S.J., Box 9, Campion Collection, Midwest Jesuit Archives. 29. Karl Voelker, S.J. The Emperor Has No Clothes, 17 February 1975, William Leahy, S.J., Campion Correspondence Varia Incomplete, Box 3, Campion Collection, Midwest Jesuit Archives. 30. Campion Task Force Meeting, 23 December 1974, William Leahy, S.J., Campion Correspondence Varia Incomplete, Box 3, Campion Collection, Midwest Jesuit Archives. 31. Bruce Biever, S.J. to the Province Announcing the Closing of Campion, 8 May 1975, William Leahy, S.J., Campion Correspondence Varia Incomplete, Box 3, Campion Collection, Midwest Jesuit Archives. 32. John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 260. 33. Ibid. 34. Joseph H. Fichter, Jesuit High Schools Revisited (Washington, D.C.: Jesuit Educational Association, 1969), 182–184.

12 ✛

The National Education Association: Champion of Equality in Education or Roadblock to Change? Jennifer Heth

The National Education Association (NEA), with its 3.2 million members, is the largest teachers’ union in the country. Founded in 1857, this association developed dual purposes in order to further the cause of education in America. The NEA serves as a professional association which provides educational opportunities and employment support for its members in addition to its declared goals of promoting excellence and equity in America’s public schools.1 According to the NEA, the Association has promoted racial equality; it has supported and continues to support Title IX and opportunities for women and girls in education and educational employment; and it has led the way in opposing discrimination against GLBT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender) students and teachers.2 The NEA’s opponents, on the other hand, claim that the Association has consistently opposed educational reforms, and with its power and influence, protected unqualified teachers and failing school systems. In particular, opponents cite the NEA’s refusal to support vouchers as proof of the Association’s resistance to change. Some have argued that, as a result, the NEA has restricted educational opportunities for students, particularly those whose families cannot afford to send their children to private schools if their public schools prove to be inadequate. Moreover, opponents have referenced the NEA’s opposition to the No Child Left

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Behind Law (NCLB) passed by Congress in 2001 as further evidence of its desire to maintain the status quo. Given the disparity of viewpoints concerning the NEA’s objectives and its desired outcomes as reported by the Association and its critics, it is necessary to investigate and analyze the role the NEA has played, both past and present, in promoting educational equality and excellence in America’s public schools and determine if the NEA has been a leader in educational reform or a supporter of the status quo. Because of the vastness of the topic, it will be necessary to refine the parameters of the issue in order to manage the discussion in the space provided. Therefore, the first portion of this chapter will examine the NEA’s role in ensuring equal opportunities for women, racial minorities, and GLBT students and teachers. This section will focus on how and in what capacities the NEA has protected and promoted the equal rights of these groups. The chapter’s second section begins with a sampling of the NEA’s critics and their arguments with particular emphasis on the Association’s opposition to vouchers (and by extension the school choice provisions of NCLB). This section will conclude with the NEA’s reasons for the continued opposition to vouchers and No Child Left Behind Law. The National Education Association, originally called the National Teachers Association (NTA), was founded in 1857 by 43 educational employees in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.3 And while the NEA was not the first professional organization for teachers, it proved to be the first viable national organization. The goal of the Association was “to elevate the character and advance the interests of the profession of teaching, and to promote the cause of popular education in the United States.”4 Despite the fact that two women were present at the inaugural meeting, the original constitution asserted that “gentlemen only” were invited to join the Association. The ladies, Agnes W. Beecher and Hannah D. Conrad, signed the constitutional agreement and were permitted to hold honorary memberships.5 Just after the Civil War in 1866, NEA members voted to amend the Association’s constitution to allow women access to full membership. Within three years of the change, and only twelve years after the formation of the Association, NEA members elected their first woman officer. Emily Rice was selected as the Association’s vice president in 1869—a full 50 years before the ratification of the 19th Amendment that guaranteed women the right to vote in the United States. The move also reflected the increase in the number of women entering the profession.6 This change is not only significant in that it now allowed women to join the Association, but also in that the constitution contained no racial or ethnic restrictions on membership.7

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During the early years of the Association, the NEA discussed and debated the major educational concerns of the day, most notably, ensuring that children in America, including women and girls, had access to schools and educational opportunities. For example, Professor J. K. Hosmer of the University of Missouri presented a paper to the 1874 annual meeting in Detroit titled, “Co-Education of the Sexes in Universities,” in which he debated whether the growing practice of co-educational institutions for men and women benefited students and American society (Hosmer believed it was, although he did include some cautionary tales about students who had stepped out of acceptable social boundaries).8 Other topics addressed during these years included the quality of public schools in rural areas and the southern states, social classes in the educational system, the education of poor children, and the industrial education of women.9 But it was not until 1884, nearly twenty years after gaining full membership, that women in the Association had the opportunity to address NEA members at the annual convention. Prior to this year, women could submit papers on educational topics, but the papers were read by men.10 In 1884, Louisa Hopkins, Frances E. Willard, and May Wright Sewall each spoke on an aspect of the topic, “Woman’s Work in Education,” while Clara Conway specifically addressed the concerns regarding the education of southern women.11 May Wright Sewall remarked on the significance of the panel during her speech and outlined the contribution of women to the teaching profession as well as the benefits gained by both sexes as a result. Sewall also noted the habitual practice of the convention speakers referring to the audience as “gentlemen,” despite “the fluttering of fans and the fluttering of ribbons, and the gay waving of plumes . . . from the audience.” With her gentle humor, Sewall encouraged adopting changes to reflect the more inclusive audience.12 In 1910, another milestone for women in the NEA was reached when, through bold political maneuvers, Ella Flagg Young of Chicago was elected as the first female president of the Association.13 The Committee on Nominations had selected X. Z. Snyder of Colorado as the presidential candidate, but when the report was presented at the annual convention, a minority report was proposed from the floor by Miss Katherine D. Blake of New York in which she put forth Ella Flagg Young as the presidential candidate. This was the first time a woman had been nominated for the position, but it was also the first nomination from the floor of the convention. When it came time for the delegates to vote, the minority report was accepted and Mrs. Young was elected unanimously.14 Ella Flagg Young was no newcomer to the education business. She started her teaching career at the age of 17 and later worked as “a principal, then district superintendent, university professor of education, and finally, in 1909,

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superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools.”15 Her dedication to students, teachers, and education in general was obvious; her chosen motto: “Life attains its highest eminence not by sitting idle upon past achievements but by steadily pressing onward and upward.”16 Unfortunately, Young’s presidency was plagued by opposition from the more conservative sectors of the organization. In particular, Young faced open hostility from NEA trustees over control of the organization’s funds.17 Young demanded an investigation into whether or not the group had mismanaged the NEA Permanent Fund, and although no irregularities were discovered, the internal struggle over control of the Association continued. Eventually, changes in demographics and organization would result—higher-education leaders began leaving the Association and were replaced by K–12 classroom teachers. In addition, the NEA adopted the Representative Assembly format giving more power to the annual convention delegates rather than the elected officers of the Association.18 In 1917, the NEA relocated to Washington, D.C. in order to be close to the legislative action. It was also during this year that the NEA began alternating the presidency between men and women.19 The next major leap forward for women and girls in education would come in the 1970s with laws designed to prevent discrimination based on sex. First, the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 stated that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”20 The NEA was a strong supporter of the new legislation and has opposed efforts to weaken the law or limit its enforcement. Recently, new attacks have been made against the continuation of Title IX, but the NEA has campaigned to see that the law remains on the books.21 In 1974, the NEA supported the case of Susan Cohen, a Virginia classroom teacher who was “forced by her district to leave her teaching position and take unpaid leave in her fifth month of pregnancy.”22 Prior to the Supreme Court’s decision in Cohen v. Chesterfield Board of Education, school districts could require pregnant teachers to take unpaid leave four to five months before the birth of their children and then require that they reapply for their teaching position when they chose to return. The Supreme Court ruled that the forced maternity leave penalized “a female teacher for deciding to bear a child.”23 Finally, rounding out the major events of the 1970s, the NEA actively supported the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and its Representative Assembly voted in 1975 “not to hold meetings in states that had not ratified” the proposed constitutional amendment.24 Even though the ERA failed to become part of the United States Constitution, the NEA continues to sup-

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port the spirit of the proposal through its Resolution I-54, “Equal Opportunity for Women.”25 In addition, the Women’s Issues Committee, as part of the Association’s Advisory Standing Committees, continues to identify issues of particular concern to women and girls in education and “advises the [NEA’s] president and the governing bodies.”26 When educators formed the NEA in 1857, the Association did not include women as full members, but very quickly the NEA developed a much more progressive stance on the inclusion of women and girls in education and educational employment. In fact, by 1979, the NEA could be described as being “among the most militant advocates of equal rights for women.”27 Today, NEA continues to fight to ensure that the gains that have been secured are not lost. Like women, ethnic minorities, particularly African Americans, witnessed a slow movement toward progressivism that gained momentum not long after the NEA celebrated its centennial. At the 1857 inaugural meeting of the National Education Association, Agnes W. Beecher and Hannah D. Conrad were allowed to sign the organization’s constitution, but were not permitted to join. Not so for Robert Campbell, an African American educator from the Philadelphia Institute for Colored Children—he was made a full member at the first meeting.28 But Campbell’s early inclusion in the NEA does not reflect the struggle African Americans encountered in later years. Although the NEA’s Constitution, amended in 1866 to include women, did not forbid racial and ethnic minorities from membership, many states adopted the “separate but equal” principle and applied it to public education, and by extension, to educational organizations.29 This does not mean, however, that the NEA was unconcerned with issues related to the education of racial minorities during its early years. For example, at the 1880 annual meeting in Chautauqua, New York, Gustavus J. Orr of Georgia presented his paper, “The Education of the Negro—Its Rise, Progress, and Present Status,” in which he outlined the history of Black education from slavery through the present. Just four years after the conclusion of Reconstruction, Orr stated that “the adoption of these [new state] constitutions marks the era of the admission of the negro, with the free consent of the white race, to the full rights of citizenship, including the right to free education.”30 The NEA was also one of the first national organizations to recognize and promote the work of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute. Washington addressed the Association’s national meeting no fewer than four times—in 1884, 1896, 1904, and 1908.31 In 1884 and 1896, Washington outlined his philosophies for the education and future of Black students in the United States. Specifically, Washington spoke to the need for industrial, practical education for African Americans, particularly in the South.32 Through industrial education, what Washington referred to

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as “developing the head, and hand, and heart,” he hoped to see the state of the entire nation, both Black and white, improve considerably.33 While the NEA and its members were willing to listen to Washington’s speeches and applaud his efforts, very little progress was made in improving education and educational employment opportunities for Black Americans.34 But the slow steady change for the NEA would begin to accelerate with the creation of the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools in 1904; renamed the American Teachers Association (ATA) in 1937.35 Beginning in 1926, the ATA began collaborative efforts to investigate the problems in Black schools, particularly the accreditation of Black high schools by the Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools of the Southern States.36 For those dedicated to improving the lives of African Americans through education, the accreditation of Black high schools was a landmark issue as many colleges and universities would only accept applicants from accredited secondary institutions. But accreditation was not the only issue addressed by the joint NEA-ATA committee. The quality of textbooks used in both white and Black schools was also a concern as was ensuring that African Americans were portrayed “fairly and accurately.”37 The NEA as an organization was concerned with the education of Black students and the rights of Black teachers, but it was having difficulty addressing the failings of the “separate but equal” doctrine within the organization and in American society. The struggles the NEA faced internally on the issue of desegregation reflected the problems the nation as a whole experienced in coming to terms with its factions. As the NEA tried to advance the cause of education in all of America’s regions for both Black and white students, the conservative southern state affiliates consistently blocked the progressive movements of the organization. The internal strife was exacerbated by the NEA regulation that allowed for the recognition of only one NEA-affiliated state association. Many southern states forbid Black teachers “by law and custom” from joining the white NEAaffiliated state organizations.38 As a result, thousands of Black teachers in these southern states were excluded from participating as state delegates to the Representative Assembly and their voices remained unheard in that arena.39 In 1951, the joint NEA-ATA committee proposed the creation of dual state affiliates “if members of that association are not eligible to be active members of the already recognized affiliated state association.”40 The issue of desegregation of America’s public schools further demonstrates the internal struggle the NEA faced. By 1953, desegregation had risen to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness and the NEA was forced to address the issue as well. Just as the nation was conflicted over how to progress toward desegregation without alienating the southern states, the NEA needed to tread cautiously forward to avoid leaving their

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southern affiliates behind. Even after the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the NEA did not force its dual affiliates in the southern states to merge. It seemed as though the elected leaders of the organization were hesitant to take that step, although many members were becoming impatient. During the 1950s, the NEA Representative Assembly repeatedly argued over resolutions encouraging desegregation, but southern members were often successful in blocking or moderating the language of such resolutions to the point that no effective action could take place.41 Although the NEA as an organization was not at the forefront of the movement to desegregate American society, members were making their presence felt in other meaningful ways. For example, in 1958, the NEA paid nearly $250,000 to compensate Black teachers for salaries lost as a result of the integration of public schools (and the closing of Black schools) in Arkansas.42 The NEA also filed an amicus curiae brief in the Supreme Court case Griffin v. The School Board of Prince Edward County, which reopened schools that had closed to avoid desegregating.43 The most significant steps taken by the NEA in the arena of desegregation, however, did not occur until the early 1960s. In 1963, the Representative Assembly voted to determine under what conditions a merger between the NEA and the ATA would be “desirable and feasible.”44 The following year, delegates at the annual Representative Assembly voted to eliminate the dual state affiliates in the South and gave the NEA’s Executive Committee the power to take “necessary action” if the state affiliates had not desegregated by July 1, 1966. At the 104th annual meeting of the National Education Association, the delegates celebrated the historic merger of the NEA with the American Teachers Association. But the NEA’s Executive Committee voted on July 2, 1966, to temporarily suspend the Louisiana Teachers Association for failing to meet the requirements set forth two years earlier.45 It would not be until near the end of the 1960s that all NEA state and local affiliates were fully merged.46 The 1960s were a time of internal struggle for the NEA, but the Association still managed a number of progressive accomplishments. In 1965, the NEA participated in the voter registration drive in Selma, Alabama, and supported equal voting opportunities for its Black members with the slogan, “Fit to Teach, Fit to Vote.”47 Since 1967, the NEA has honored those who “promote human rights and advance human relationships,” at the annual Human and Civil Rights Award dinner which remains a staple of the Representative Assembly schedule. Finally, in 1968 the NEA launched its Center for Human Relations to promote and monitor civil rights both internally and externally.48 It was also in 1968 that the NEA elected its first African American president, Elizabeth Duncan Koontz. The daughter of teachers, Koontz studied at Livingston College, earned an M.A. degree from Atlanta University,

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and taught special education in Salisbury, North Carolina while she worked her way up the ranks of the NEA. Koontz did not believe that she was selected as NEA’s president because of her race; in fact, she stated, “I would not have accepted the nomination had I thought it was because of my race.”49 Most significantly, Koontz’s presidency signaled a change for the NEA as she “perceived the need for increased Association activism as a paramount direction for her NEA presidency and urged NEA to lead rather than follow change as it occurred.”50 Despite its slow start, the NEA has become one of the greatest advocates for racial equality in the country. The NEA pushed for the passage of legislation making Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday a national holiday and through the Dushane Fund for Teacher Rights has worked to ensure equal rights regardless of race or ethnicity.51 Today, the NEA maintains its Committee on Human and Civil Rights as part of its collection of Strategic Priority Standing Committees dedicated to “[attaining] equitable treatment for all and [eliminating] discrimination in all forms and at all levels.”52 Moreover, numerous NEA Resolutions reflect the organization’s continued efforts to ensure equal access and equal opportunity for all.53 The NEA’s progressive turn during the 1960s benefited all NEA members, as well as students, but none more so than GLBT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender) teachers, students, and education support staff. GLBT Americans continue to struggle to attain the civil rights and equal opportunities enjoyed by other minority groups, and are supported in their efforts by the NEA. But the road to such equality has been difficult, and there is still a long way to go before GLBT Americans are judged solely by their abilities rather than their sexual orientation. Just as African Americans fought against the “separate but equal” doctrine, GLBT Americans are fighting against laws that limit their civil rights.54 The first major step in the struggle for gay rights took place in New York’s Greenwich Village. On June 27, 1969, police once again raided the Stonewall Inn and other gay bars in the area, but this time the patrons fought back, and the gay rights movement was born.55 Although the issue of gay rights has become a more common subject of media and legislative conversations, many GLBT teachers are afraid to participate in the movement. “While gay men and lesbians may be growing more visible in American life, teachers who come out in school still risk harassment, dismissal, and physical violence.”56 In her book, Unheard Voices: The Effects of Silence on Lesbian and Gay Educators, Ronni L. Sanlo outlined the emotional turmoil faced by gay and lesbian teachers debating the need to remain quiet and protect their careers and the desire to throw off the cloak of silence and reveal their true selves. As she stated, “Society’s past and current expectations of teachers do not consider the concept that they may be gay or lesbian . . .

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and that it is nearly impossible for a teacher to continue in the classroom once she or he is labeled, voluntarily or not, accurately or not as gay or lesbian.”57 As a result, many continue the silence out of economic and emotional necessity. The legal arena has been both friend and foe to the GLBT community. While laws governing sexual harassment and hate crimes provide gay and lesbian students and teachers a legal avenue to pursue equal protection, many in the GLBT community choose not to take the fight to the courts in order to avoid the publicity such cases attract.58 On the other end of the spectrum, the passage of explicit legal language designed to protect GLBT Americans from harassment and discrimination seems elusive. For example, in September 1996, the U.S. Senate had the opportunity to combat discrimination based on sexual orientation in employment with the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). Unfortunately, the Senate voted to keep most GLBT teachers and students in the closet out of fear for their jobs and their safety when it rejected the bill.59 Not only have lawmakers chosen not to actively protect the civil rights of GLBT Americans, but some states have passed laws that expressly limit the rights of gays and lesbians.60 The silence, harassment, and discrimination profoundly affect the personal and professional lives of GLBT teachers and education support staff, but they also impact GLBT students. Without the visible, positive role models of GLBT teachers, many gay and lesbian students struggle with their identities and their places in the larger society. One teacher in Sanlo’s study described the heartache of the issue: “I would love to help them, but I can’t. . . . They have nowhere to go. These kids are going through the same thing I went through at their age and it’s hell to watch. I want to tell them to hang in there, to survive. But I can’t.”61 And the situation is urgent; gay and lesbian teens “are at greatly increased risk of suicide.” But the forced silence of gay and lesbian teachers prevents them from reaching out to students who so desperately need their guidance.62 The National Education Association began actively addressing the concerns of GLBT teachers and students in 1975 when it added “sexual orientation to its non-discrimination policy.”63 Since that time, the NEA has developed workshops and training materials to help educate its members about issues and concerns facing GLBT teachers, students, and education support staff,64 including efforts to combat bullying based on sexual orientation. The NEA’s Resolution B-11 illustrates the organization’s commitment to preventing discrimination and maintaining equal opportunities regardless of sexual orientation or gender identification.65 By examining the NEA’s internal and external struggles to ensure and protect the civil rights and equal educational opportunities of its members, and by extension, all teachers and students, one is able to see the changes and progression of the Association’s stance on equality in

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education. From the organization’s early conservative positions on women and African Americans, through the internal conflict of the 1950s civil rights and desegregation movements which reflected the struggles faced by the nation at large, to the Association’s present progressive policies of inclusion—it is clear that the NEA, after a slow and halting start, has become one of the nation’s foremost defenders of equal opportunity in education and educational employment. But despite, or perhaps because of, the NEA’s progressivism, the Association has become a major target for critics who cite the NEA’s opposition to vouchers and the school choice provisions of the No Child Left Behind Law as proof that the Association is not interested in educational reform, but rather is focused on maintaining the status quo. In the era of Reaganomics and the Cold War, Sally D. Reed and Samuel L. Blumenfeld each published books attacking the NEA and its progressive ideology. Reed, in her 1984 book, NEA: Propaganda Front of the Radical Left, criticized the NEA for its support of affirmative action, the Equal Rights Amendment, and gay rights. According to Reed, in a time when “the rest of society is considering the question of whether it is wise for homosexuals to teach at all in public schools . . . the NEA is telling us that we should give preference to homosexuals.”66 Reed, argued that parents must “prevent Soviet-style control from being imposed on our children and on our lives.”67 Blumenfeld, likewise, relied on Cold War imagery to paint a negative picture of the NEA and its goals: “The NEA is everything the communists believe a labor union in America should be. . . . it never criticizes the Soviet Union [and] no form of anti-communism can be found in its publications.”68 Both Reed and Blumenfeld criticized the NEA’s opposition to vouchers and tuition tax credits, which Reed argued was “anti-religious.”69 And while Blumenfeld reported that the NEA is “vehemently” opposed to vouchers as they “could lead to racial, economic, and social isolation of children and weaken or destroy the public school system,”70 he provided no evidence or data to support his positions. Setting aside the Cold War rhetoric, recent critics have developed a more sophisticated set of criticisms of the NEA and its stance on vouchers. For example, G. Gregory Moo’s 1999 book, Power Grab: How the National Education Association is Betraying Our Children, also noted the NEA’s opposition to vouchers, but instead of trying to “out” the Association’s communist members, Moo argued that the “NEA’s rabid resistance to school choice is not born of concern for student learning [but rather the] NEA’s concern for its own survival.”71 In fact, Moo’s thesis is that the NEA as an organization is motivated by one thing and one thing only, “the aggressive, relentless pursuit of power,” not the welfare of American students or even, when it comes right down to it, the teachers of the NEA.72 Moo even suggested that if the NEA was truly searching for progressive edu-

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cational reform, it would support vouchers and tuition tax credits.73 But while Moo suggested that vouchers might work, he provided little information to combat the argument that vouchers could decrease equality in educational opportunities and make struggling schools fail completely. Furthermore, Moo neglected the fact that widespread public support for vouchers simply does not exist.74 Peter Brimelow’s The Worm in the Apple: How Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education (2003) continues where Moo left off—by attacking the NEA as the maintainer of the educational status quo and for acting as a roadblock in the quest for educational reform. According to Brimelow, “the NEA, basically, is a parasite upon the body educational.”75 But Brimelow’s arguments, in the true spirit of an economist, boil down to the fact that the NEA’s opposition to vouchers makes the American system of education less efficient. The solution to America’s education woes is simple, according to Brimelow, “give parents the money directly, let them spend it on the school of their choice, and an efficient school industry will spring up to rival the supermarket industry.”76 Like Moo, Brimelow believed the NEA’s opposition to vouchers has more to do with preserving the power of the union than with ensuring student opportunities.77 As to the NEA’s fears that vouchers will negatively impact educational opportunities by re-introducing segregation in public schools, Brimelow stated that “in taking this stance, the unions are barring the barn doors after the horse has bolted.”78 Finally, Terry M. Moe concurred with Moo and Brimelow in that the NEA’s chief motivation in opposing the voucher movement is the Association’s desire to protect the influx of dues dollars and not the welfare of students and teachers. “The unions see vouchers as a survival issue. Vouchers would allow money and children to flow from public to private: threatening a drop in public employment and union membership.” It is because of this fear, according to Moe, that the NEA continues to oppose vouchers “even when vouchers are proposed solely for the neediest of children.”79 To sum up the critics’ arguments, the NEA resists vouchers which would allow public school students and their parents access to alternative school choices because the Association is afraid that public school students will overwhelmingly choose private schools. The success of private schools will then encourage public school teachers to abandon public schools in favor of private schools, leaving the union with fewer dues-paying members to support its healthy appetite for power and its expanding budget. As mentioned above, this sampling of critics has argued that the NEA opposed vouchers because of its desire to maintain the current educational system and its prominent place in it. Of course, if these critics are correct in their assessment, the Association would never admit it. But it seems un-

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likely that an organization, comprised of teachers and other educational employees—one that has undergone the kinds of internal and external struggles to secure civil rights and equal educational opportunities— would base such an important decision on the desire to expand its budget. Why then does the NEA oppose vouchers, and by extension, the school choice provisions of the No Child Left Behind Law? The NEA believes that vouchers and tuition tax credits are harmful to America’s system of public education for three main reasons. First, vouchers and tuition tax credits divert monetary resources from public schools. The basic argument is that in order to have quality public schools for all students, schools need to be properly and adequately funded; a notion that is compromised with a voucher system. Second, vouchers and tax credits can “cause racial, economic, and social segregation of students.”80 Because private schools have the ability to selectively admit students, the concern would be that private schools would not admit African Americans or other minorities and would exclude students with learning disabilities as well. Finally, vouchers would provide public funds for parochial schools and erode the established principle of separation of church and state.81 By allowing students to use vouchers to attend religious schools, the federal, state, and/or local governments would be directly funding religious organizations. While NEA critics may argue that the Association has selfishly opposed all voucher programs, they have provided very little evidence to suggest that vouchers will not limit equality in educational opportunity. Therefore, the NEA and its critics are essentially engaged in a political and ideological debate on how to best serve and educate America’s youth. The NEA has called for “great public schools for every child,” while critics such as Peter Brimelow and Terry Moe have insisted on a shift to a “market-based” educational system in which educational funds would follow the student. The opposition to the NEA, as a result, is an opposition to the continuation of the current system of education. In the end, the NEA, as an organization and as a collection of education employees, has promoted equality in educational opportunities. The fight began slowly and haltingly, but now that advances have been attained, the NEA will work to ensure that all students have a chance to succeed, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identification.

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QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER 1) Has the NEA been an asset or hindrance in the pursuit of excellence and equality in the nation’s public schools?

2) Based on the conflicting documents provided, describe how the NEA critics view the association as a supporter of the status quo. How do members of the NEA see themselves as promoters of equality and excellence in the public school system? What accounts for the discrepancy?

3) Do educational institutions require constant reforms? What social, political, or economic issues prompt the reform impulse?

4) Define equality and discuss the concept’s impact on American education over the last three centuries.

h IN THEIR WORDS Sewall, May Wright. “Woman’s Work in Education.” The Addresses and Proceedings of the National Education Association, Session of the Year 1884. Boston: National Education Association, 1885: 155. Gradually the woman walked through the elementary departments, through the grammar departments, into the high school. Still the thought remained that nature had endowed man for the ruling places there, and as a principal of high schools, only very recently has woman been given the opportunity to show what she might do. Still, the thought remains that for the executive labor that falls to the superintendent, a man yet must be retained, and only very rarely are women called upon to fill those places, kept from them by the same limitations of thought, the same limitations of feeling, the same limitations of prejudice, even in this relatively enlightened hour, that they were first kept entirely from the schoolroom. Women do, however, hold the office of superintendent, and in these higher places, as superintendents, as principals, as professors in colleges, as tutors, the same agencies are working to the same results, and the insight, ability, which lies at the basis of psychology, psychology necessarily lying at the basis of instruction, is going through her work with the larger as through

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her work with the younger. The intellectual contributions of woman to education can hardly be sketched. One may say there is not much yet to tell. Naturally, so far, woman’s best efforts have been given to the young of their own sex, for the educated woman’s first feeling, I might almost say her primary conviction, is that her duty binds her to her own sex, that she may make to them possibilities for such training as was denied her. So most of the great teachers among women, those whose names have become at all illustrious in the profession, have become so in connection with girls’ schools or woman’s colleges, established and carried forward by them in the hope, expressed or unexpressed, of, through these efforts, by and by, attaining the absolute equality that the first aspiring women dreamed of. From these limitations has come one more contribution which I cannot forbear to mention, that which we may call the inspiration of the profession. I do not doubt that the gentlemen present, as well as the women present, if their school days are sufficiently near to have placed them under the influence of women teachers, would join in the testimony that it was the women teachers rather than the men teachers who have inspired them with the ambition to go beyond what seemed to be the limits of their possibilities, under their instruction.

h NOTES 1. NEA Handbook 2007-2008 (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 2008), 10; Allan West, The National Education Association: The Power Base for Education (New York: The Free Press, 1980), 257. 2. NEA Handbook 2007–2008, “Resolutions,” 189–196. 3. Susan Lowell Butler, The Women’s Historical Biography of the National Education Association (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 1996), 19; see also Michael John Schultz, Jr., The National Education Association and the Black Teacher (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1970), 17. 4. West, 1. 5. Butler, 19. 6. Butler, 22–24; West, 2; Sabrina Holcomb, “Answering the Call: The History of the National Education Association (Part 2),” NEA Today (February 2006), (accessed online at www.nea.org/neatoday/0602/neahistory2.html on November 12, 2008). 7. Schultz, 14; There would be other issues that racial minorities would face in the early years of the NEA as explained below. 8. J. K. Hosmer, “Co-Education of the Sexes in Universities,” The Addresses and Journal of Proceedings of the National Education Association, Session of the Year [hereafter NEA Proceedings] 1874 (Worcester, Mass: National Education Association, 1874), 118–133.

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9. W. F. Phelps, “The Country School Problem,” and A. P. Marble, “Caste in Education,” NEA Proceedings, 1875 (Salem, Ohio: National Education Association, 1875), 7–15 and 22–32, respectively; Alexander Hogg, “The Lacks and Needs of the South Emotionally—the Development of her Natural Resources—the Remedy,” and William C. Russel, “What can be done to secure a larger proportion of educated labor among our producing and manufacturing classes,” NEA Proceedings, 1876 (Salem, Ohio: National Education Association, 1876), 76–90 and 257–265, respectively; John Hitz, “Destitute Children,” NEA Proceedings, 1879 (Salem, Ohio: National Education Association, 1879), 217–220. 10. Butler, 30; West, 2. 11. May Wright Sewall, Louisa Hopkins, and Frances E. Willard, “Woman’s Work in Education,” and Clara Conway, “The Needs of Southern Women,” NEA Proceedings, 1884 (Boston: National Education Association, 1885), 153–176. 12. May Wright Sewall, “Woman’s Work in Education,” NEA Proceedings, 1884 (Boston: National Education Association, 1885), 153–156. 13. Butler, 34; West, 6; Schultz, 19. 14. Schultz, 19–21. 15. Butler, 36. 16. Josiah L. Pickard, “Introduction of President Young,” NEA Proceedings, 1911 (Chicago: National Education Association, 1911), 74–75. 17. Butler, 37. 18. West, 6. 19. Butler, 35. 20. National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education, Title IX at 35: Beyond the Headlines, www.ncwge.org/PDF/TitleIXat35.pdf (accessed November 11, 2008), 1. 21. Catherine Barrett, “Report of the President,” NEA Proceedings, 1973 (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 1973), 8; NEA Handbook 2007–2008, 197 and NEA Resolution I-54, “Equal Opportunity for Women,” 317; NEA Today Online, “Title IX: More Than About Sport,” (April 2003), www.nea.org/neatoday/ 0304/trends.html (accessed November 12, 2008); NEA, “Title IX,” www.nea.org/ titlenine/index.html (accessed November 12, 2008). 22. Butler, 129 and 144. 23. Lisa A. Kloppenberg, Playing It Safe: How the Supreme Court Sidesteps Hard Cases and Stunts the Development of the Law (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 212. 24. West, 25 and 199; Butler, 128. 25. NEA Handbook 2007–2008, 317. 26. NEA Handbook 2007–2008, 38–39. 27. West, 24. 28. Schultz, 14; Sabrina Holcomb, “Answering the Call: The History of the National Education Association (Part 1),” NEA Today (January 2006), (accessed online at www.nea.org/neatoday/0601/neahistory.html on November 12, 2008). 29. Thelma D. Perry, History of the American Teachers Association (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 1975), 14, 29 and 273; West, 22.

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30. Gustavus J. Orr, “The Education of the Negro—Its Rise, Progress, and Present Status,” NEA Proceedings, 1880 (Salem, Ohio: National Education Association, 1880), 87. 31. Schultz, 48. 32. Booker T. Washington, “The Educational Outlook in the South,” NEA Proceedings, 1884 (Boston: National Education Association, 1885), 125–130. 33. Booker T. Washington, “The Influence of the Negroes’ Citizenship,” NEA Proceedings, 1896 (Chicago: National Education Association, 1896), 208–217. 34. Schultz, 45 and 52. 35. Perry, 42 and 47; The name was originally the National Association for Negro Teachers, but in order to include the white teachers who taught in black schools, the name was changed to the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools. 36. Perry, 163 and 165; West, 23; Sabrina Holcomb, “Answering the Call: The History of the National Education Association (Part 3),” NEA Today (March 2006), (accessed online at www.nea.org/neatoday/0603/neahistory3.html on November 12, 2008). 37. Perry, 203; see also Schultz, 57. 38. West, 22; Perry 273. 39. Perry, 273; West, 22. 40. Schultz, 64. 41. Schultz, 65. 42. Schultz, 95; Sabrina Holcomb, “Answering the Call: The History of the National Education Association (Part 4),” NEA Today (April 2006), (accessed online at www.nea.org/neatoday/0604/history4.html on November 12, 2008). 43. Schultz, 147–148; West, 103. 44. Perry, 330; Schultz, 142. 45. Schultz, 154–155, 180, and 203; NEA Proceedings, 1966 (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 1966), foreword; also, Irvamae Applegate, “Individual Commitment to Professional Excellence,” NEA Proceedings, 1966, 7. 46. West, 122; Schultz, 180–182. 47. West, 104; Holcomb, “Answering the Call (Part 4),” NEA Today (April 2006). 48. West, 106. 49. Schultz, 187; Butler 110–111. 50. Butler, 110. 51. West, 112-113; Butler, 66 and 108. 52. NEA Handbook 2007–2008, 36–37. 53. See NEA Handbook 2007–2008, “Resolutions,” 189–196. 54. Rita M. Kissen, The Last Closet: The Real Lives of Lesbian and Gay Teachers (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996), 110–111. 55. Ronni L. Sanlo, Unheard Voices: The Effects of Silence on Lesbian and Gay Educators (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1999), 8. 56. Kissen, 2–3. 57. Sanlo, xvi and 90. 58. Sanlo, 12. 59. Sanlo, 11.

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60. Kissen, 110–111. The legal battles over gay rights continue on a variety of issues all over the United States. Proposition 8, which was approved by 52 percent of Californians on November 4, 2008, limits marriage to one man and one woman. “California high court asked to hear same-sex marriage ban lawsuits,” USA Today, November 17, 2008 (www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-11-17-prop-8-challenges_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip accessed November 17, 2008). 61. Sanlo, 99. 62. Kissen, 57; Sanlo, 97, states that “A Federal Task Force Report on Youth Suicide documented that adolescents struggling with sexual orientation issues committed more than a third of all teen suicides.” 63. Sanlo, 8–9. 64. Sanlo, xviii; see NEA, “Strengthening the Learning Environment: A School Employee’s Guide to Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues” (2006). www.nea.org/takenote/glbtguide06.html accessed November 17, 2008. 65. NEA Handbook 2007–2008, “Resolutions,” 217–218. 66. Sally D. Reed, NEA: Propaganda Front of the Radical Left (Alexandria, VA: National Council for Better Education, 1984), 89. 67. Reed, 7. 68. Samuel L. Blumenfeld, NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education (Boise, ID: The Paradigm Company, 1984), 199. 69. Reed, 94. 70. Blumenfeld, 222. 71. G. Gregory Moo, Power Grab: How the National Education Association is Betraying Our Children (New York: Regnery, 1999), 245 and 217. 72. Moo, xiv, 217 and 267. 73. Moo, 229–230. 74. Randall W. Eberts, Kevin Hollenbeck, and Joe A. Stone, “Teacher Unions: Outcomes and Reform Initiatives,” in Teacher Unions and Education Policy: Retrenchment or Reform? Ronald D. Henderson, Wayne J. Urban, Paul Wolman, eds. (Oxford, UK: Elsevier Ltd, 2004), 65. 75. Peter Brimelow, The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), xvii. 76. Brimelow, xviii. 77. Brimelow, 132. 78. Brimelow, 139, 142–143. 79. Terry M. Moe, “A Union By Any Other Name,” in Choice and Competition in American Education, Paul E. Peterson, ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 133–134. 80. NEA Handbook 2007–2008, 207. 81. In addition to its opposition to voucher programs, the NEA has opposed the parental choice options made available by the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), or the No Child Left Behind Law; this is not the only aspect of NCLB that the NEA objects to, but the other components of the law lie outside the scope of this paper; see NEA Handbook 2007–2008 for additional information on this topic.

Index

A Beka Book Publications, 197–98 Abbott, Lyman, 127 Abington Township v Schempp, 185, 189–90 academy, 5–10, 40–50, 55–65, 186–96 Accelerated Christian Education (ACE), 198 Adams County, Mississippi, 191 Adams, John, 42–44 Adams, John Quincy, 49 Advanced Training Institute (ATI), 220 Alexander v Holmes, 194 American Association of Christian Schools (AACS), 194, 199–200 American Revolution, 5–7, 35–49 American Teachers Association (ATA), 256–257 Amherst College, 59–63 Anderson, David, 225 Arrupe, Pedro, 239–41 Articles of Confederation, 6, 35

Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI), 199 asylums, 7, 79–105 Austin T. E. A. Party, 211–34 Bailyn, Bernard, 11–14 Baltimore, Maryland, 109, 236 Barlow, James, 218 Beecher, Agnes, 252,5 Beecher, Catharine, 57 Beecher, Lyman, 104 Bergman, Gerald, 183–84,187 Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS), 186 Blodget, Samuel, 45, 48 Blumenfeld, Samuel, 217, 221–23, 260 board of education, 101–2, 106–8, 167–74, 176–78, 190, 204, 211, 225, 228, 254–57 Bob Jones University, 189–92, 198 Bodine, Alfred, 155

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Index

Boston, Massachusetts, 4, 21–22, 107– 10, 211, 219 Bradrick, Susan, 217 Bridgeport, Connecticut, 147–58 Brimelow, Peter, 261–62 Brooks, Hal, 241–242 Brown, Olympia, 59–60 Brown University, 63 Brown v Board of Education, 101–2, 110, 172, 190–92, 257 Bryan, William Jennings, 184 Bumgarmer, Anne, 216 Campbell, Robert, 255 Campion Jesuit High School, 235–47 Canon, Ruth, 217 Carter, James G., 103 Carver, George Washington, 168 Catholic, 8, 71, 104–9, 114–16, 159, 188–94, 230, 235–47 Chamberlin, Ray, 189 Chautauqua, New York, 255 chemistry, 59–60, 70 Chestnutt, Charles, 136 Chicago, Illinois, 142, 194–95, 237, 241, 253–54 Christian, 56, 63, 71, 102–4, 125–27, 131, 141, 183–201, 212–24, 242–47 Christian day schools, 183–201, 195 Christian Liberty Academy (CLA), 217, 221 Christian Schools International (CSI), 199 Civil War, 113, 125–26, 237, 252 Coalition on Revival (COR), 222 Co-Education of the Sexes in Universities, 253, 264 Cohen, Sol, 14–15 Cohen, Susan, 254 Comiskey, Charles, 238 common school, 6–7, 12, 16, 90, 103– 14, 204, 235 Concerned Women for America (CWA), 220 Congress, United States, 40–49, 130, 147–48, 158, 252, 259

Congress of Industrial Organizations, 158 Connecticut, 7, 147–60, 195 Conrad, Hannah, 252, 255 Conway, Clara, 253 Conway, Roxie, 169 Cremin, Lawrence, 12–15 Cubberley, Ellwood, 12–16 curriculum, 3–9, 17–19, 36, 55–68, 82–84, 148–49, 154, 166, 172, 184–87, 197–99, 218, 224–25, 243 dame schools, 4–5 Day, Jeremiah, 61, 74 Dayton, Tennessee, 185 Delaware, 5, 170, 195, 204 District of Columbia, 45–46, 254 Downing, George, 112 Dubois, W. E. B., 133–36 Dudley, Charles, 129 Dushane Fund, 258 Eaton, Amos, 59 Emerson, Joseph, 60–61, 64–65 Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), 259 Engel v Vitale, 185, 190 England, 2, 38–39, 243 Equal Rights Amendment, 254, 260 Europeans, 2, 14, 37–47, 62, 102, 114, 147–50, 218 evangelical, 71, 103, 183–200, 211–12, 218, 231 Everettville, West Virginia, 167–73 evolution, 126–27, 183–87, 190, 196–97, 200, 212–15 Fakkema, Mark, 189 Falwell, Jerry, 192, 213–15 Farrington v Tokushige, 222 Farris, Michael, 223 Federal Writers’ Project, 149–51 Fichter, Joseph, 244–47 Florida, 8, 194–99 Fort Worth, Texas, 224–25 Fox, Dewey, 167–71 Fox, Vicente, 238

Index free schools, 2 French, 2, 37–39, 44, 61–62, 69–71, 74 fundamentalist, 184–200, 212–18, 222–24 geography, 5, 55–58, 62–63, 69, 82 geometry, 60, 69 Georgia, 5, 131, 166, 194, 195, 255 Gish, Duane, 183–84 Godey’s Ladies Book, 58 grammar, 60, 64, 68–69, 82, 226, 263 grammar schools, 1–5, 152 Greek, 4–5, 56, 61 Griffin v School Board of Prince Edward County, 257 Hale, Sarah, 56 Hamilton, Alexander 35, 38, 40–44, 48 Hampton, Fred, 241 Hampton Institute, 131, 134 Hargis, Billy, 187 Hartford, Connecticut, 60–63, 151 Harvard University, 4, 30, 63, 244 Hilbert, Robert, 241–44 Hill, Hilary, 128 Hill, Paula, 217 Holt, John, 20–23, 216–17 Home Oriented Private Education (HOPE), 225 Hopkins, Louisa, 253 Horton, Arlin and Beka, 197–98 Hotze, Steven, 222 Houston, Texas, 217–22 Howard, Donald, 198 Howard University, 170 Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), 223–24 Hughes, John, 108, 235–36 Illich, Ivan, 18–22, 216–17, 243 Illinois, 104, 195, 221–24 integration, 7, 13, 101–6, 109–117, 186, 190–96, 257 Ivoch, Herbert, 216 Janney, Alek, 199 Jeanes Fund, 136 Jefferson, Thomas, 6, 42–43, 47–48 Jesuits, 2, 235–50

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Jim Crow, 166 John Birch Society, 214–15 Kelly, Thomas, 239 Kennedy, John Reid, 189 Keyes v Denver, 191, 196 Klicka, Chris, 224 Knox, Henry, 42, 47 Knox, Samuel, 36, 8 Koontz, Elizabeth, 257–58 Kozol, Jonathan, 20–25 LaHaye, Beverly, 220 Land Ordinance, 6 Latin, 3–5, 56, 61–62, 68 Leeper, Cheryl and Gary, 217, 221–23, 227 Lewis, Samuel, 103 Liberty Baptist University, 192 Lines, Patricia, 212 Lippmann, Walter, 185 literature, 38, 41, 46–47, 55, 64–65, 147, 242–45 Livingston College, 257 logic texts, 64–68 Loyola, Ignatius, 240 Lucas, Louis, 191 Lucey, Greg, 242–46 Lyman, William, 46 Lyon, Mary, 57–59, 67 Madison, James, 35, 41–46 Man: A Course of Study (MACOS), 187 Mann, Horace, 6–7, 13, 101–18 Maryland Free School Law, 2 Massachusetts, 1–9, 16, 102–6, 110–18, 195 mathematics, 5, 37–41, 55–64, 68, 196, 217, 226–27 McCarthyism, 212–15 McEnery, Samuel, 131 McGirr, Lisa, 213 Mebane, George, 133 Memphis, Tennessee, 191–92, 196 Mencken, H.L., 185 Mercer, Charles, 103, 107

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Mercer University, 134 Middlebury College, 58–59 Miller, Kelly, 135–38 Milton, Byron, 239 mining schools, 171–73 Mississippi, 127–30, 191–94, 195, 237 Mohonk Conference, 125–33 Monongalia County, West Virginia 166–181 Moo, Gregory, 260–61 Moore, Dorothy and Raymond, 217, 221–25 moral education, 3–4, 46–47, 55–57, 64–68, 72, 80–85, 125–27, 134, 193, 217–21, 231–32 Moral Majority, 215, 223 Morgantown, West Virginia,166–180 Mount Holyoke College, 55, 59–62, 72–76 National Afro-American Council, 133 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 171–72 National Association of Evangelicals, 189 National Education Association (NEA), 8, 18, 146, 251–67 Nevada, 195, 223 New Britain, Connecticut, 151 New England, 2–5, 102, 149–50 New Hampshire, 5, 195 New Right, 212–13 Nicholas, John, 46, 49 No Child Left Behind (NCLB), 97, 252, 260–62 North Carolina, 2, 126, 133, 195, 258 Northwest Ordinance, 6 Ohio, 113, 195, 223 Ohio State University, 170 Oregon, 195, 221–24 Oregon Christian (Home) Education Association Network (OCEAN), 224 orphans, 79–81, 90–97 Orr, Gustavus, 255

Parents Education Associations Political Action Committee (PEAPAC), 221, 224 Parker, R.G., 65–66 Peck, William, 113 Pennington, Randy, 214 Pennsylvania, 2–6, 46, 193–94, 195, 252 Pensacola Christian Academy, 197 Pensacola Christian College, 217 Pierce, v Society of Sisters, 222 Posey, Thomas, 165 prayer, 8, 72, 85–86, 185, 190–92, 196–97, 200–4 Princeton University, 40 Providence, Rhode Island, 110–12 Quakers, 2–3, 125 Reed, Sally, 260 reform, 6–7, 13–18, 24–26, 36, 55–58, 67, 80–87, 101–11, 124, 132–33, 138–40, 147–48, 158–61, 211, 216, 252, 260–63 republican, 6, 35–36, 43–48, 53–57, 63–68, 73, 104–8, 112 Resolution B-11, 259 rhetoric, 5, 15, 58, 64–68, 103–4, 108–10, 121, 183, 187–191, 260 Rice, Emily, 252 Rice, John, 187–188 Ritter, Marion, 215 Robertson, Pat, 213–15 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 171, 177 Rush, Benjamin, 35–41, 47, 51–52 Rushdoony, Rousas, 217, 221 Salisbury, North Carolina, 118, 258 Say, Michael, 223, 229 Schlafly, Phyllis, 213 science, 38–47, 55–61, 68–70, 186, 196–98, 216 seminary, 50, 55–72, 105 Sewall, May, 253 Seward, William, 104, 236 Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), 187

Index Shaw, Lemuel, 112 Silman, Benjamin, 60 Smiley, Albert, 125–26 Smith, Hoke, 131 Smith, Mattie, 167 Smith, Samuel, 36–38 Smith-Hughes Act, 147 Society for Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 2 South Carolina, 2, 127, 191–94, 195 Southern Baptist Convention, 192 spelling, 64, 82, 168 Sputnik, 186 Stemper, Thomas, 239 Storer College, 170 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 104 Stumptown, West Virginia, 167–70 Sumner, Charles, 110–14 Swann v Charlotte-Mecklenburg, 190 T. E. A. See Austin T. E. A. Party Texas, 211–34 Texas Home School Association (THSC), 225 textbooks, 56–59, 64–65, 74, 108–9, 172, 186, 190, 197–98, 203, 215–17, 219, 232, 256 Title IX, 254 Tourgee, Albion, 126 Troy Seminary, 55–59, 63–64, 69–77 tuition, 4–5, 37, 102, 171, 260–62 Tuskegee Institute, 134, 255

273

university, 6–7, 35–51, 191, 223, 253 Utah, 195, 223 Vatican Council, 240, 248–49 Vermont, 6, 59, 73 Virginia, 2, 6, 39–48, 103, 128–29, 165–66, 170, 174–81, 192–94, 195, 234, 254 vocational training, 4–7, 18, 82, 87, 91, 137, 147–158, 172 Voelker, Karl, 246, 250 vouchers, 8, 37, 251–52, 260–62, 267 Warner, Charles, 129 Washington, Booker, 133–134, 145–46, 168, 255–56, 266 Washington, George, 35–49, 202, 218, 270 Way, Brian, 219 Wendt, George, 238 West Virginia, 165–174, 195 Wilberforce, 133, 170 Willard, Emma, 57–59, 63, 67–69, 72 Willard, Frances, 253 William and Mary College, 39 Wills, Garry, 238 Winston, George, 129 Wisconsin, 194, 195, 222, 237, 246–47 Wisconsin v Yoder, 222 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 171–74 Yale University, 45, 60–63 Young, Ella Flagg, 253

About the Contributors

Sarah Mulhall Adelman is currently with Johns Hopkins University. The focus of her research includes nineteenth-century education and New York City orphan asylums. Casey Beaumier is currently with Boston College. His research interests include Jesuit schools in America and American Catholic history. Chris Beneke is an Assistant Professor of History at Bentley College, Massachusetts. He is the author of Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (2006). Emily Conroy-Krutz is currently with Harvard University. Her current research interests include nineteenth-century America, gender history, and the American foreign missionary movement. Joshua Garrison is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. Most recently, he is the author of “A Problematic Alliance: Colonial Anthropology, the Theory of Recapitulation, and G. Stanley Hall’s Program for the Liberation of America’s Youth” (2008).

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About the Contributors

Ivan Greenberg holds a Ph.D. in History from City University of New York. Most recently, he is the author of Vocational Education, Work Culture, and the Children of Immigrants in 1930s Bridgeport (2007). He is also preparing a manuscript entitled Trouble Times: The FBI and Civil Liberties Since the 1960s. Jennifer Heth is currently with the University of North Dakota. Her research interests include the Cold War and foreign relations, as well as history and memory. Adam Laats is an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Binghamton University, New York. He recently published The Quiet Crusade: The Moody Bible Institute’s Outreach to Public Schools and the Mainstreaming of Appalachia, 1921–1966 (2006). Ryan McIlhenny is an Assistant Professor of History at Providence Christian College, Ontario, California. His current research interests include American religion, philosophy, the American Revolution, Atlantic slavery, anti-Catholic literature, and historiography. Debra Meyers is the Director of Integrative Studies and Associate Professor of History at Northern Kentucky University. She recently published Common Whores, Vertuous Women, and Loveing Wives and coedited Colonial Chesapeake: New Perspective. Burke Miller is an Assistant Professor of History and Content Coordinator for Secondary Social Studies at Northern Kentucky University. Connie Park Rice teaches at West Virginia University. She is the author of Our Monongalia: A History of African Americans in Monongalia County, West Virginia (1998). Ryan Staude is with the University of Albany, New York. His research interests include George Washington, political philosophy, and nationalism. Tracy Steffes is an Assistant Professor of Education and History at Brown University. She recently published an article entitled “Solving the Rural School Problem: New State Aid, Standards, and Supervision of Local Schools, 1900–1933” (2008).