reflection chapter 4
212 The American School
102. Horace Mann Bond, The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order (New York: Octagon Books, 1966), p. 153.
103. Anderson, Education of Blacks, pp. 22-23. 104. Ibid., p. 23. 105. Ibid., p. 149. 106. Aida Negron De Montilla, Americanization in Puerto Rico and the Public-School
System, 1900-1930 (Rio Piedras: Editorial Edil, 1971), pp. 6-79. 107. Ibid., p. 163. 108. Ivan Musicant, The Banana Wars: A History of the United States Military Intervention
in Latin America from the Spanish-American War to the Invasion of Panama (New York: Macmillan, 1990), p. 2.
109. De Montilla, Americanization in Puerto Rico, p. 62. 110. Ibid., pp. xi-xii. 111. Ibid., p. 37. 112. Ibid., pp. 35-36. 113. Ibid., p. 36. 114. Ibid., p. 51. 115. Ibid., pp. 47-48. 116. Ibid., p. 49. 1 17. Ibid., p. 48. 118. Ibid., p. 58. 119. Ibid., pp. 63-64. 120. Ibid., p. 71. 121. Ibid., pp. 105-106. 122. Ibid., pp. 121-123.
Growth of the Welfare Function of Schools: School Showers, Kindergarten, Playgrounds, Home Economics, Social Centers, and Cultural Conflict
In the late nineteenth century, immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, together with industrialization, and expanded urban areas created a host of social problems, especially in cities. Crowded ghettos, inadequate urban services, and a population primarily use to rural living contributed to unsanitary living conditions and the spread of disease. Added to these conditions was a belief held by many Americans that a sense of community was being lost with the growth of urban America and that this loss would cause the urban population to suffer alienation, a breakdown in traditional forms of social control, and, as a consequence, increased crime and poverty. Fear also arose that the new immigrants would destroy tradi- tional American values and create a strong following for radical economic and political ideas. As the social functions of education increased, there was greater resistance to racial segregation.
The school was considered a logical institution to prevent these problems by providing social services, teaching new behaviors, and creating a community cen- ter. Nurses, health facilities, and showers were added to schools in order to con- trol the spread of disease, and special instructional programs were introduced to educate children about sanitary conditions. Americanization programs were offered as a means of assimilating children of immigrants into American life and prevent- ing the spread of radical ideologies. School cafeterias were opened to provide children with healthy food and to Americanize the diets of immigrants. Home economics blossomed as a field of studies in order to free women from the drudg- ery of household tasks, Americanize immigrant households, and apply scientific methods to household management. Playgrounds were attached to schools to pro- vide after-school activities for children—activities that, it was hoped, would reduce juvenile delinquency. To curb the sense of alienation caused by urban
213
214 The American School
living, auditoriums and special facilities for adults were provided by schools to serve as centers for community activities.
All these educational changes expanded the social functions of the school. Of course, ending poverty and crime had been a traditional goal of the school since the early nineteenth century, but common school reformers at that time had seen those goals being achieved through instruction in the classroom. The changes in the late nineteenth century made the school more than a center of instruction by turning it into a major social agency.
John Dewey, the great educational philosopher of the period, explained the new social functions of the school to educators who gathered in 1902 for the annual convention of the National Education Association. He told school people from around the country that education must provide a "means for bringing peo- ple and their ideas and beliefs together, in such ways as will lessen friction and instability, and introduce deeper sympathy and wider understanding." Using the schools as social centers, he argued, would morally uplift the quality of urban living by replacing brothels, saloons, and dance halls as centers of recreation. More important, he considered the school to be a potential clearinghouse of ideas that would interpret to the new urban industrial worker the meaning of his or her place in the modern world. Through an exchange of ideas and the establishment of relationships with a variety of people, an understanding of others and the bonds of an interdependent society would develop. The school as social center, Dewey told his audience, "must interpret to [the worker] the intellectual and social mean- ing of the work in which he is engaged: that is, must reveal its relations to the life and work of the world." For Dewey, therefore, the new role of the school was to serve as an agency providing social services and a community center that would solve the problem of alienation in an urban industrial society.
IMMIGRATION FROM SOUTHERN AND EASTERN EUROPE
Until the late 1880s, immigration from Europe was primarily from England, Ireland, and Germany. The Irish and German immigration brought with it more Catholics who sometimes were in conflict with the Protestant majority. Between the late 1880s and 1930s immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe increased the Catholic population and brought with it larger numbers of Greek and Russian Orthodox, and Jews. In addition, the number of spoken languages increased. By 1930 laws restricted the flow of immigrants. The slowdown in immigration continued until the 1960s when new laws ushered in the most recent period of large-scale immigration.
As indicated in Table 8.1, immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe steadily increased from the 1890s to 1930. The statistics for 1910 give some indica- tion of which countries contributed the largest number of immigrants. In 1910, according to Table 8.1, the Austro-Hungarian empire (after 1920 it was divided into Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Yugoslavia) provided the largest number of immigrants (258,737), with Italy being second (215,537) and Russia third (186,792). The numbers for 1930 dramatically show the effect of immigration laws with the
CHAPTER 8: Growth of the Welfare Function of Schools 215
TABLE 8.1. Number of Immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe by Country and Selected Dates:1880 to 1930
1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930
Italy
Spain, Portugal, and Greece
Poland
Russia/ USSR
Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey in Europe
Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia (since 1920), Yugoslavia (since 1920)
12,354 52,003 100,135
1,631 3,960 8,360
2,177 11,073 Between 1899 and 1919 included with Austria/ Hungary
5,014 35,598 90,787
35 723 6,852
17,267 56,199 114,847
215,537
37,740
Between 1899 and 1919 included with Austria/ Hungary
186,792
25,287
258,737
95,145 6,203
48,009 4,647
95,089 in 9,231 1921
1,751 2,772
3,913 2,159
5,666 9,184
Source: Compiled from statistics provided in Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Part I (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), pp. 105-106.
numbers for Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Yugoslavia declining to 9,184, Italian immigration declining to 6,203, and Russian immigration to 2,772.
While there was a small number of immigrants from Asia between the 1880s and 1930s, as indicated in Table 8.2, the numbers from this area did not signifi- cantly increase until after the 1960s. Also, the number of immigrants, as indicated in Table 8.3, from the Caribbean and Central and South America remained low between the 1880s and 1930s but increased after the 1960s. The majority of immigrants from other parts of the Americas were from Canada and Mexico. As indicated in Table 8.3, there were few immigrants during this time period from Central and South America; for instance, only 3,044 in 1910. There was a steady stream of immigrants from the Caribbean islands with, as indicated in Table 8.3, 11,240 in 1910 and 13,800 in 1920.
Therefore, public school Americanization programs between the 1880s and 1930s primarily focused on Southern and Eastern European immigrants. After the upsurge of immigrants resulting from changes in immigration laws in the 1960s, public school programs related to immigration and language began to focus on immigrants from Asia and Central and South America.
216 The American School
TABLE 8.2. Number of Immigrants from Asia by Country and Selected Dates: 1880 to 1930
China
India
Japan
Korea
Turkey in Asia
1880
5,802
21
4
No record of immigra- tion until 1948
4
1890
1,716
43
691
No record of immigra- tion until 1948
1,126
1900
1,240
9
12,635
No record of immigra- tion until 1948
3,962
1910
1,960
1,696
2,720
No record of immigra- tion until 1948
15,212
1920
2,330
300
9,432
No record of immigra- tion until 1948
5,033
1930
1,589
110
831
No record of immigra- tion until 1948
118
CHAPTER 8: Growth of the Welfare Function of Schools 217
Source: Compiled from statistics provided in Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Part 1 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), pp. 107-108.
TABLE 8.3. Number of Immigrants from Americas by Country, Region, and Selected Dates: 1880 to 1930
Mexico
Caribbean Islands
Canada
Other America
1880
492
1,851
99,174
105
1890
No records
3,070
183
580
1900
23
4,650
396
166
1910
2,680
11,240
56,555
3,044
1920
52,360
13,800
90,025
6,472
1930
12,703
5,225
65,254
4,922
Source: Compiled from statistics provided in Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Part I (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), pp. 108-109.
DEVELOPING WELFARE FUNCTIONS OF SCHOOLING AND DISCRIMINATION TIME LINE
INTEGRATED TIME LINE
The expansion of school welfare activities took place against a background of immi- gration, segregation, and continuing debates about who should have U.S. citizenship. The anti-immigrant attitudes of some Anglo-Americans extended to the new wave of arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe. Some Anglo-Americans believed that Southern and Eastern Europeans were less intelligent than Anglo-Americans and that they were not prepared to participate in a republican society. These attitudes and events were similar to the discrimination faced by Native Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic/Latino Americans, and African Americans.
The time line that follows is intended to integrate important events affecting dominant groups with the expansion of school social services. For instance, six to seven years after the opening of the first reported summer school (1872) and kin- dergarten (1873), the Carlisle Boarding School (1879) opened to deculturalize Native Americans. The playground and play movement and lesson plans were being introduced during the same years that the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) excluded Chinese immigrants and the Tape decision (1885) required California to provide schools for Chinese, which the state did in the form of segregated schools. John Dewey opened his laboratory school (1896) one year after the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated schools constitutional in Plessy v. Ferguson (1895).
The expanded social function of schooling occurred at a time when racist laws and court rulings were supporting segregation and cultural genocide. Racism in education and school changes occurred simultaneously. For instance, I cannot find any comments by John Dewey about the increasing racist policies in education as he was organizing the Laboratory School. One might say that he didn't care about the issue and therefore the issue was not raised. However, these were major edu- cational events at the time. One could argue that John Dewey, like some other European Americans, accepted these racial events as part of the ideology underpin- ning the American republic. While he didn't work for the creation of segregated education, his lack of participation in fighting educational deculturalization and
Hist reported summer school
1872
Carlisle Boarding School tot decultsralizatioa of NativeAmericans
Beginning of play and playground movement
1873 1879 1880s 1880 1882
Plessy v. Ferguson Tape decision decision allowing for Model school allowing racially segregated cafeteria School social
1885
Texas courts declare Mexican Americans not
1889 1895 1896 1897 1899 1909
B«tU.S,j»iWic Lesson plans begin as part Chinese Exclusion Act school kindergarten of Heibartian Movement
First reported school shower
218 The American School
segregation is a form of racism. In other words, he appears to have accepted the racial attitudes held by other European Americans.
Even the introduction of the school shower (1889) was based on the prejudice of Anglo-Americans toward Southern and Eastern European immigrants. The stereo- type in the minds of Anglo-Americans was that the new immigrants were dirty and lacked a tradition of cleanliness. In a broader context, the expanding welfare function of the school and the Americanization programs were part of the continuing cultural struggles faced by U.S. schools.
THE KINDERGARTEN MOVEMENT
A major educational movement that combined the expansion of the social role of the school with an emphasis on improving urban living was the movement to establish public kindergartens. Kindergartens had originally served upper-class families, but by the 1880s and 1890s they were considered a primary educational method of dealing with the problems of urban poverty. In a broader context, one could argue that early childhood education, as represented by the kindergarten movement, originated in concerns with urban problems.
The concept of kindergarten as introduced in the United States in the 1860s and 1870s by Carl Schurz and Elizabeth Peabody was almost mystical in nature. The original kindergarten was opened in Germany in 1840 by Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) as a method of early childhood education that was to lead the child from a world concentrated on self to a society of children. As the name implies, the kindergarten was conceived as a garden of children to be cultivated in the same manner as plants. Like Johann Pestalozzi, Froebel advocated a model mater- nal teacher whose method "should be passive and protective, not directive and interfering." Froebel believed that the divine spirit existed in all humans and that it was the key to social harmony. By cultivating the garden of children, the kin- dergarten teacher was to bring forth their divine spirits and create a sense of unity among all humans.
The first public school kindergarten in the United States was opened in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1873, for the specific purpose of dealing with urban poverty. In his excellent history of the St. Louis school system, The Public and the Schools: Shaping the St. Louis System, 1838-1920, Selwyn Troen describes how that sys- tem's famous superintendent, William Torrey Harris, analyzed the distribution of children in the city according to the locality of "haunts of vice and iniquity" and decided that the only way of saving slum children from corruption was to get them into school at an early age. Harris first requested that the school board lower the minimum age of school attendance. After being refused by the school board, he recommended the establishment of kindergartens as a permanent part of the school system. Harris claimed that kindergartens were necessary because traditional socializing agencies such as the family, church, and community had collapsed:
Living in narrow, filthy alleys, poorly clad and without habits of cleanliness, "the divine sense of shame," which Plato makes to be the foundation of civilization, is very
CHAPTER 8: Growth of the Welfare Function of Schools 219
little developed. Self respect is the basis of character and virtue; cleanliness of person and clothing is a sine qua non for its growth in the child. The child who passes his years in the misery of the crowded tenement house or alley, becomes early familiar with all manner of corruption and immorality.
Within this context, the kindergarten was to be a substitute for the habits of living and moral training formerly taught by the family organization that supposedly had been lost in the slums of the new urban areas.
The curriculum established for the kindergarten in the St. Louis school system was intended to redeem the slum child by, in Troen's words, bridging "the 'nur- ture' of the family with the established program of the district school." A major effort of the kindergarten program was to teach virtues and manners considered necessary for community living. Emphasis was placed on teaching moral habits, cleanliness, politeness, obedience, promptness, and self-control. Thus, the kinder- garten was to be not only a substitute for the socialization that supposedly was no longer offered by the family, but also a preparation for the habits required by the school.4
This same relationship between urban reform and the kindergarten is found by Marvin Lazerson in his brilliant history of the Boston school system, Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870-1915. According to Lazerson, the first director of Boston's kindergartens, Laura Fisher, saw them as being directly concerned with elevating the home life of the urban poor. In an article published in 1904, she states, "The mere fact that the children of the slums were kept off the streets, and that they were made clean and happy by kind and motherly young women; that the child thus being cared for enabled the mother to go about her work in or outside the home—all this appealed to the heart of America, and America gave freely to make these kindergartens possible."5
A major goal of the early kindergarten movement was to teach children hab- its that would reform the home. In other words, the early kindergarten was viewed as a means of educating the parents, particularly the mother. An early example of this thinking can be seen in Lucy Wheelock's tale "A Lily's Mission," in which two slum children bring a flower home to their dingy apartment. The mother has failed to keep the house clean; the father is out drinking. Overjoyed at seeing the flower, the mother places it on a windowsill, only to discover that dirt prevents any sunlight from shining through the window to the flower. With the window clean, the sunlight reveals the filth of the apartment, which is then quickly cleaned. The mother washes and dresses, and the father, overcome by his new environment upon his return home, vows to give up the bottle.6
The concept of parental education introduced by the kindergarten movement extended the role of the school in a new direction that gave the kindergarten a social role far beyond anything originally intended by Froebel. As a new educational institution, the kindergarten was to compensate for the supposed loss of socializa- tion within the slum family, to protect the young child from the influences of the street, to provide preparation for entrance into regular elementary school classes, and to educate the parents. These extended social goals resulted in the kindergarten losing its original emphasis on creative play and self-expression. In place of these activities, the kindergarten stressed creating order and discipline in the child's life
220 The American School
as compensation for family life and as preparation for school. Lazerson found that as the kindergarten evolved in Massachusetts in the twentieth century, it became less involved in parental education and that, in the end, discipline, order, and protection from the urban environment became its primary objectives.
HOME ECONOMICS: EDUCATION OF THE NEW CONSUMER WOMAN
Another extension of the school into the household was introduction of courses in home economics in public schools. Home economists hoped to educate "the new woman," who through the application of domestic sciences would be freed from household drudgery to pursue further education and participate in urban reform projects. The new woman was to be primarily a consumer rather than a producer of household products. Wishing to professionalize the role of the house- wife, home economist experts characterized the new woman as a household man- ager who was mainly responsible for maintaining household budgets and buying goods for the home. After receiving home economics education in public schools, experts believed, future housewives would have increased time available to pursue an education and engage in social reform movements. Also, home economists hoped that domestic science would protect the family unit against the worst aspects of urbanization and industrialization. The 1909 announcement of the founding of the American Home Economics Association gave as its goal "the improvement of living conditions in the home, the institutional household, and the community."7
As a profession, home economics evolved from an annual series of confer- ences held at Lake Placid, New York, beginning in 1899 under the leadership of Ellen Richards. Richards, the founder of the American Home Economics Asso- ciation and the first woman to receive a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), brought together a faith in the ability of science to improve human existence, a desire to improve women's education, and a belief that the home was the central institution for reforming society. Reflecting these concerns, Richards, after graduating from MIT in 1873, convinced the institution to establish a Woman's Laboratory in 1876. In 1883, Ellen Richards became the first female instructor at MIT as the separate women's laboratory was torn down and women joined men as students at the institution. Richards taught courses on sanitary and household chemistry that focused on cooking and cleaning. In 1887, Richards conducted a study of municipal sewage treatment systems and developed the first water purity standards.9
Placing the society's ills at the doorstep of the home, domestic scientists saw a cure through nutritional food, sanitary cooking, budgeting, and household clean- liness. Nutritionally balanced food, it was believed, would provide the energy for hard work and resistance to the temptations of the tavern. Wholesome food served in the home and school cafeteria would stimulate students to study and protect them from illness. Hospital patients would recover more quickly as a result of scientifically planned menus and food. Sanitary cooking and household cleanliness
CHAPTER 8: Growth of the Welfare Function of Schools 221
would protect everyone from sickness. Protected from illness and energized by nutritional foods, it was believed, workers would be less likely to miss work and more likely to retain their jobs. According to the calculations of home economists, these circumstances would reduce unemployment, crime, and alcoholism. For the same reasons, students would complete their studies and find good jobs. Also, proper management of the household budget would keep families from falling into poverty. Workers would be less likely to strike if their wives could make existing wages satisfactory through proper budgeting. This belief in the ability of home economics to reform society was summed up in 1902 by Marion Talbot at the fourth annual meeting of the Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics. These conferences foreshadowed the establishment of the American Home Economics Association. Talbot stated, "the obligations of home life are not by any means limited to its own four walls, that home economics must always be regarded in light of its relation to the general social system, that men and women are alike concerned in understanding the processes, activities, obligations and opportunities which make the home and family effective parts of the social fabric."10
Along with saving society, home economics was to liberate women from house- hold drudgery and make them active participants in shaping society. Ellen Richards worried that "the industrial world is ruled by science and that all the things with which we surround ourselves are now manufactured upon scientific principles, and, alas! women are ignorant of those principles."11 The study of science and home economics would, Richards hoped, make housekeeping into a profession. A 1890 editorial in the New England Kitchen Magazine proclaimed, "We need to exalt the profession of home making to see that it is as dignified and requires as much intel- ligence as other professions."12 Science and technology would be the key to elimi- nating household drudgery. As Ellen Richards explained, "The woman who boils potatoes year after year, with no thought of the how or why, is a drudge, but the cook who can compute the calories of heat which a potato of given weight will yield, is no drudge."1
The so-called philosopher of home economics, Caroline Hunt, clearly delin- eated the new role of women as consumers. Her interests in science and social reform paralleled those of Ellen Richards. Born in Chicago in 1865, Hunt entered Northwestern University in 1881 and, after interrupting her studies to teach high school, graduated in 1888. After teaching high school for several more years, she returned to Northwestern University to study chemistry. While at Northwestern, she lived with Jane Addams at Hull House and engaged in studies of newly arrived immigrants, including The Italians in Chicago: A Social and Economic Study (1897) and Dietary Studies in Chicago (1898). In 1896, she was hired to teach Domestic Economy and operate the cafeteria at Chicago's Lewis Institute. Then in 1903, she was hired by the University of Wisconsin to organize and head a School of Domestic Science.14
While at Lewis Institute, Hunt equated women's freedom with a change in household roles from producer to consumer. Women would have more free time for education, she argued, if they bought factory-made products rather than producing them in the home. For instance, a housewife could be a producer of soap or a consumer of factory-made soap. "The woman who today makes her own soap
222 The American School
instead of taking advantage of machinery for its production," she wrote "enslaves herself to ignorance by limiting her time for study. The woman who shall insist upon carrying the home-making methods of today into the tomorrow will fail to lay hold of the possible quota of freedom which the future has in store for her"15
Throughout her writings, Caroline Hunt highlights the importance of the transi tion of the household tasks from that of production to consumption. For Hunt this transition was part of a larger process of industrialization and job specialization Comparing the past to existing conditions in a paper that she read at the 1904 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, Hunt argued, "The home has delegated to the school not only the technical but also the general education of the child' to the factory the manufacture of clothing, of furniture, and of house furnishings "16 Although the responsibilities of the household were changing, she contended, they still played an important role in society. Households were still responsible for raising the child to school age and teaching morality. Plus, Hunt added, homes were responsible for education about beauty and what she called "rational sociability."
Rational sociability, according to Hunt, was an important aspect of the educa- tion of the consumer. From her perspective, the consumer had a social responsibil- ity to influence producers regarding their treatment of workers and the sanitary production of food products. In her discussion of higher education at the 1906 Lake Placid Conference, she argued that "home economics, if considered as pri- marily a training for intelligent consumption, should be introduced into the college education." She defined intelligent consumption as demonstrating a concern for the general welfare of society. "The wise consumer," she told the conference "has in mind not only his own advantage, but the welfare of those who make, transport and care for the commodities he uses."18 The consumer, from this perspective must be educated into an awareness of the conditions of workers This added a social reform aspect to the role of consumption. "He [the wise consumer] thinks of himself as responsible, not only for the happiness and well being but also for the continued efficiency and social usefulness of the producer. He hopes that by his own use of wealth he may so direct human energy as to educate the worker and to increase the world's resources."19
Arguing that home economics should be introduced into the college curricu- lum "primarily [as] a training for intelligent consumption," Hunt listed the need tor food, shelter, clothing, cleanliness, and beauty as the focus of this study20 Food courses were well defined, she argued, but instruction on the satisfaction of the other needs had to be expanded. In a telling statement of her vision of the future role of women, Hunt argued, "There is ... an important way, other than thru [sic] purchase of food, in which women control a large amount of human energy, and that is thru [sic] buying and using what may be called art products including clothing and house furnishing. We feel, I am sure, that the college should give students an intelligent attitude with reference to the responsibilities arising from their consumption of these products."21
Hunt envisioned college-educated women finding time for engaging in social reform movements by consuming rather than producing household goods In other words women would be freed to engage in "municipal housekeeping." Released from household chores, women could apply their education, particularly from home
CHAPTER 8: Growth of the Welfare Function of Schools 223
economics, to protecting the household from deleterious industrial and social prac- tices. She called this "Woman's Public Work for the Home."22 At the 1907 Lake Placid Conference she argued that when women are "forced by their responsibility for the family welfare into a fight for a public milk supply of assured purity, and are unsuccessful in the fight, we may take this as an indication that young women now in college should be taught to seek and to overcome the difficulties which lie in the way of the present accomplishment of this much needed reform."
Hunt related freedom from food preparation to the rise of democratic thought and an emphasis on freedom for the individual. Under democracy, she contended, individual freedom meant enhanced opportunities for women rather than absence of restraints. Freedom for women, Hunt argued, required passing "over to public enterprise the work of food preparation and the responsibility for the care of houses, thus releasing in woman's life energy for individualization."24
Ellen Richards and Caroline Hunt's hopes seemed to be realized with the rapid spread of home economics courses in public schools and colleges. According to Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, 20 percent of high schools offered courses by 1916-1917, and the number of college students enrolled in courses increased from 213 in 1905 to 17,778 in 1916. Most of those enrolled in college courses were preparing to be home economics teachers.25 The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 ensured the spread of home economics courses to public schools and universities. This federal legislation provided support for home economics teachers in public schools to prepare girls for the occupation of homemaker. In turn, this required the hiring of home economic instructors on college campuses to train teachers. These college and university instructors also trained cooks for hospitals, school cafeterias, and other institutional settings. Home economists also expanded their careers by becoming researchers in food technology at private companies and universities, and consultants to private industry for product development and sales. The vocational emphasis of the Smith-Hughes Act tended to compromise the role of home
224 The American School
economists as scientists. Historian Rima Apple concluded, "In the early twentieth century, women who wanted to pursue careers in scientific research were frequently counseled to study home economics.... As home economics units became increas- ingly involved with teacher training for public school instruction . . . [this] lessened the perceived significance of the scientific aspects of home economics."26
SCHOOL CAFETERIAS, THE AMERICAN CUISINE, AND PROCESSED FOODS
Remember school cafeteria and hospital food? A major contribution of home economics was the creation of an American cuisine in school cafeterias and hos- pitals, and an emphasis on a diet based on processed foods. Working in school cafeterias and hospital kitchens, home economists hoped to Americanize the diet of immigrants. For example, an early-twentieth-century study found that Italian immigrants in Chicago were staying away from hospitals because of hospital food. Horrified, home economists tried to adjust their menus by making a "few harmless concessions" to immigrant tastes during the initial parts of the hospital stay. Later, food planners hoped, immigrants could be weaned from their traditional foods to the solid and healthy fare of the hospital kitchen. It was suggested that "Perhaps the treatment of an Italian during this period of change should be studied much as the treatment of an inebriate being won from his strong drink is studied."27 A similar attempt to change the eating habits of immigrant children occurred in school cafeterias.
In Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, Laura Shapiro credits home economists with the development of a distinctive American cuisine. She argues that during the latter part of the nineteenth century home economists "made American cooking American, transforming a nation of honest appetites into an obedient market for instant mashed potatoes."28 Reflecting on the puritanical quality of the teachings and writings of early home economists, Shapiro wrote, "But to enjoy food, to develop a sense for flavors, or to acknowl- edge that eating could be a pleasure in itself had virtually no part in any course, lecture, or magazine article."29
Home economists helped develop and sell the new American diet of prepack- aged foods. In public school and college classes, they taught how to prepare the new American diet. As researchers, they did pioneer work in food technology that resulted in the development of new food products and made possible the prolif- eration of fast-food chains. They helped manufacturers develop and sell new gad- getry for the home, such as refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and washing machines.30 And they helped to make school and hospital cafeteria food healthy, inexpensive, and bland. Through the school cafeteria, they hoped to persuade immigrant children to abandon the diet of their parents for the new American cuisine.
The new American diet resulted, in part, from Ellen Richards's research at MIT and her work with the New England Kitchen and the Boston School of Housekeeping. Richards was not alone at the New England Kitchen and the Boston School of Housekeeping in promoting the belief that improper diet and
CHAPTER 8: Growth of the Welfare Function of Schools 225
household management were undermining society. "Is it not pitiful, this army of incompetent wives," declared domestic scientist M. V. Shailer in an 1898 issue of New England Kitchen Magazine, "whose lack of all knowledge of domestic sci- ence is directly and indirectly the means of filling our prisons, asylums, reforma- tories and saloons."32 This feeling echoed earlier claims by Juliet Corson, the superintendent of the New York Cooking School. In 1877, Corson wrote a book- let titled Fifteen Cent Dinners for Workingmen's Families. Corson claimed that "The laborer who leaves home in the early morning, after an ill-cooked breakfast, and carries in his basket soggy bread and tough meat for his luncheon, is apt to return at night tired and cross, not unfrequently he tries, en route, to cure his discomfort at a neighboring saloon."
Portending the future marketing of packaged and frozen dinners, Ellen Richards helped found the New England Kitchen in 1890. The founders hoped to improve the lives of working and poor people by providing already prepared sanitary and economical food that would have consistent flavor and texture. Richards envisioned a neighborhood establishment that would prepare and sell food. The establishment would be educational because buyers could observe the sanitary conditions and cooking methods. Also, buyers would learn to expect the food, cooked under scientific conditions, to always taste the same.
Richards's dream included the standardization of American eating habits. This standardization was made possible by the work of Fannie Farmer and the Boston Cooking School. The Boston Cooking School was opened in 1879 and by the 1890s became a training ground for public school cooks with a curriculum that included Psychology, Physiology and Hygiene, Bacteriology, Foods, Laundry Work, the Chemistry of Soap, Bluing, and Starch, and Cookery Applied to Public School Work. Fannie Farmer joined the Boston Cooking School in 1888. Legend has it that standardized measurements were born when Marcia Shaw asked Fannie Farmer what it meant to measure out "butter the size of an egg" and "a pinch of salt."34 In 1896, Fannie Farmer's cookbook, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, appeared and quickly became a national best seller. A major innovation in Farmer's book was the use of leveled measurements, gaining her the epithet "Mother of Level Measurements." Farmer wrote, "A cupful is measured level. A tablespoonful is measured level. A teaspoonful is measured level."
Ellen Richards's dreams of prepackaged and standardized meals spread across the country. Jane Addams sent a settlement worker from Chicago to learn Richards's methods and created a similar kitchen at Hull House. Another kitchen opened in Providence, and Richards was invited to create a New England Kitchen at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. The exhibit was lined with food charts, menus, diagrams, and consumerist mottoes, such as "Wherefore do you spend money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which satisfieth not?"36
After the World's Fair, the New England Kitchen focused its efforts on selling prepared foods to Boston's nine public high schools and to office workers. In 1895, Richards helped to create in the Boston school system a model program for public school cafeterias. Prior to 1895, janitors in Boston schools were responsible for the lunch program. Using new theories on nutrition, sanitation, and food prepara- tion, Richards and her cooking colleagues introduced the new American diet to
226 The American School CHAPTER 8: Growth of the Welfare Function of Schools 227
Boston schoolchildren.37 These efforts set the stage for trained domestic scientists to take over school cafeterias to ensure that students received healthy and sanitary foods. The other focus was on hospital food. Richards declared that "no better school of diet could be found than an intelligently managed hospital."38
In both schools and hospitals, cafeterias were to serve the double function of supplying nutritional food and changing people's diets. Of primary concern to Protestant reformers was changing what they believed was the harmful diet of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Home economists believed that immigrants were harmed by foods that required long periods of digestion These scientific cooks were guided by a timetable created in the 1820s by an American army surgeon who studied a young man with a hole in his stomach caused by a hunting accident. The surgeon suspended food on a string in the man's stomach to determine the speed of digestion. According to this experiment, pork turned out to be the most difficult to digest and clear broth and rice were the easiest 39
Concern about rates of digestion had a limiting effect on the role of spices in cooking. In The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning, Ellen Richards argued that spices did have a role in stimulating digestive juices but warned against heavy seasonings because they might wear out the digestive tract. In her words spices should be "just enough to accomplish the purpose."40 Based on concerns about digestion, menus were created that balanced the digestive aspects of one food against another. For instance, it was proposed that first servings should include easily digestible items, such as oysters and white fish, that would prepare the gastric juices for the more difficult meat dishes. The result of concerns about digestion were recipes and menus that were noted for their blandness and lack of sensitivity to taste.
The development of this new American diet was directly linked to the image of the new woman. As home economists invaded school and hospital cafeterias with their gospel of scientific cookery, they saw the possibility of freeing the
American woman from home cooking and making it possible for her to extend her education. Ellen Richards believed that prepared foods, like those served by the New England Kitchen, would increase women's freedom.
In addition, the new American diet was associated with the so-called democ- ratization of domesticity. Home economics leaders believed that the school caf- eteria and public school courses would unite students from differing social-class backgrounds under a single standard of domesticity. In the school cafeteria and in food preparation instruction in home economics classes, students were to develop similar tastes. Girls from lower-class backgrounds were to be brought up to the same standard of cooking and cleaning as upper-class girls, while, in turn, upper-class girls were to learn the arts normally practiced by their household help. The statement of a supervisor of cooking in the New York public schools exempli- fies this democratic leveling. The female student, the supervisor observed, "is wonderfully interested in the bacteria of the dishcloth, and the ice box, and the garbage pail, and when she becomes mistress of a home these things will receive her attention as well as the parlor, library, and music room." Home economists hoped that standardized cooking and shared attitudes about housework and sanitation would open the door to a more democratic society.
Prepared food, it was believed, would mean freedom from cooking and liberation of women along with supplying the family with a sanitary, nutritious, and balanced diet. In choosing the path of prepared food, the housewife shifted her emphasis from producer to consumer. Ellen Richards projected this liberating role for prepared food in a 1900 article titled "Housekeeping in the Twentieth Century." In her dream home, where the purchase of cheap mass-produced furniture allowed more money for "intel- lectual pleasures," the pantry was filled with a large stock of prepared foods—mainly canned foods and bakery products. Richards's dream pantry was based on the reality of a growing industry for canned foods. As early as the 1820s, William Underwood sold meats packed in bottles, and in 1856 Gail Borden patented a method for con- densing milk and preserving it with sugar. By the 1870s, the technology for canning meats was perfected. In the 1870s, H. J. Heinz sold crocked pickles, horseradish, and sauerkraut, and a decade later the company expanded its product list to include cooked macaroni products and vegetables. In the 1880s, the Franco-American Com- pany began to distribute canned meals. And in 1897, Campbell's introduced canned soups after the development of a method for condensing the product. According to Ruth Schwartz Cowan, "By the turn of the century [nineteenth to twentieth], canned goods were a standard feature of the American diet. . . [including] processed foods of all kinds-packed dry cereals, pancake mixes, crackers and cookies machine- wrapped in paper containers, canned hams, and bottled corned beef."42
In Richards's imaginary description, a pneumatic tube connected to the pan- try was to speed canned and packaged food to the kitchen, where the wife simply heated up the meal. In addition, the meal would be accompanied by store-bought bread. Home economists believed that homemade bread and other bakery goods, besides being unsanitary, required an inordinate amount of preparation time and that therefore there should be greater reliance on factory-produced bread products. Ellen Richards dismissed the issue of taste with the comment, "I grant that each family has a weakness for the flavor produced by its own kitchen bacteria, but
I
228 The American School
that is a prejudice due to lack of education."43 People would stop worrying about taste, she argued, when they fully realized the benefits of the superior cleanliness and consistency of factory kitchens and bakeries. In a 1900 book, The Cost of Living as Modified by Sanitary Science, Ellen Richards provided another version of her vision of the commodification of housework. "Housekeeping," she explained, "no longer means washing dishes, scrubbing floors, making soap and candles; it means spending a given amount of money for a great variety of ready-prepared articles and so using commodities as to produce the greatest satisfaction and the best possible mental, moral, and physical results."44
THE PLAY MOVEMENT
As home economists were extending the schools' reach into the household and family diet, other educators were attempting to regulate children's play in efforts to promote healthy living and reduce juvenile crime. This approach to curing urban social problems began in the 1880s with the development of small sandlots for children, and it reached a high point with the establishment of the Chicago park system in 1904. Between 1885 and 1895, sandlots were constructed in con- gested areas of Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City. These play areas were designed for children under twelve years of age and usually included a kindergarten program. One student of the movement reports that the dominant motive for establishing sandlots was "to keep children off the street and out of mischief and vice."45
A major result of the play movement was that the school became respon- sible for the after-school play of urban children. For instance, in 1895 the chair- man of the Advisory Committee on Small Parks of New York City asked the police to indicate on a map the areas of high rates of juvenile crime. After the committee found that all areas with newly founded parks had a decreasing crime rate, it attempted to speed the development of parks by having the city adopt the following law: "Hereafter no schoolhouse shall be constructed in the City of New York without an open-air playground attached to or used in connection with the same."
In addition to protecting children from bad influences in the streets, play was to protect individuals from the nervous strain of urban living. In 1917, Henry S. Curtis, an organizer of the Playground and Recreation Association and former supervisor of the playgrounds of the District of Columbia, summarized the reasons for the widespread movement to establish playgrounds and parks in the United States. In urban areas, children confined to schools and adults trapped in factories and busi- nesses needed fresh air and the opportunity to exercise their bodies in order to avoid "the rapid increase of insanity and the growing instability of the nervous system." But, according to Curtis, "it has not been these reasons that have weighed most strongly with the people that have promoted the movement." Rather, he stated, the dominant motive and major concern of the leaders of the play move- ment was the fact that there was "little for the children to do in the cities, and that in this time of idleness the devil has found much for idle hands to do. ...
CHAPTER 8: Growth of the Welfare Function of Schools 229
The home seems to be disappearing, and crime, despite an increasingly effective police and probation system, is increasing everywhere."46
Like the kindergarten, the playground was to replace the socializing influence of family life supposedly lost in the growth of urban America. In addition to provid- ing recreation and physical activity, the playground was to teach good habits, such as cleanliness, and contribute to the general health of the community. The develop- ment of small parks included the construction of elaborate recreational and bathing facilities. For example, in 1898 Boston created a bath department as part of its city administration. This department had control of the city beaches, the floating baths, and the municipal bathhouses. The floating baths were platforms supporting a row of dressing rooms around an open area of water. In 1899, Boston had fourteen float- ing baths, two swimming pools, and seven shower baths. In New York, floating baths were started in 1876, and by 1899 a total of fifteen had been built. A campaign was waged in New York in the 1890s to increase the number of shower baths available because they were more usable during the winter than the floating baths were.
It was logical that this aspect of the playground movement would also become a school activity. The first reported school bath was a shower opened in a Boston school in 1889. Lawrence Cremin reports in The Transformation of the School that "the teachers of New York, for example, found themselves giving hundreds of baths each week. The syllabi said nothing about baths, and teachers themselves wondered whether bathing was their charge. But there were the children and there were the lice." 7 The addition of the shower room to the public school symbolized the expansion of the school as a social agency.
The playground movement was more than just an attempt to reduce urban crime and supplement the socializing influence of the family. The leaders of the movement believed that directed play was necessary for producing the types of adults required by corporate industry. An important concept in this argument is that of directed play as opposed to free play. The early leaders of the play move- ment did not want to establish playgrounds and parks where adults and children would come to play without guidance; rather, they believed that the state should interfere and direct play toward social ends. Play movement leaders like Joseph Lee and Henry Curtis wanted organized play to produce future workers who would be good cooperative citizens. Therefore, playground games and activities were organized to produce a sense of team spirit, habits of cooperation, and a willingness to play by the rules. In other words, play was viewed as another method of social control.48
SUMMER SCHOOL
The establishment of summer, or vacation, school was another means of extend- ing the influence of the school over children's lives. Cambridge, Massachusetts, was one of the first cities to propose a vacation school, or summer school. In 1872, its school committee reported the need for a vacation school because summer was "a time of idleness, often of crime, with many who are left to roam the streets, with no friendly hand to guide them, save that of the police." The superintendent
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of the same school district was still asking for a summer school as an inexpensive form of police control when he wrote in his school report in 1897, "The value of these schools consists not so much in what shall be learned during the few weeks they are in session, as in the fact that no boy or girl shall be left with unoccupied time. Idleness is an opportunity for evil-doing. . . . Thpisf sr-h^^- «~" Reform c^Vi^—1- -'
.«e u^ i^w weexs ^v/u, as in me ract that no boy or girl shall be left with unoccupied
time. Idleness is an opportunity for evil-doing. . . . These schools will cost money. Reform schools also cost money."
Slimm î- r«-.u~~i
.„ iu uj. ujjpunumty to ^ ~^^,i muncy. Reform schools also cost money.' "
Summer schools were established in rapid succession in urban areas. Boston established them in 1885, New York in 1894, Cleveland in 1897, and Chicago in 1898. The Chicago vacation schools were considered models. They were opened in the most densely populated parts of the city, and enrollment was limited to a first- come, first-served basis. The principal of the system reported that they were received with such enthusiasm that "at one of the schools it was found necessary to call in the police to remove the parents who crowded the halls of the building, insisting that their children must be accepted. In another area, fifty children were held up on their way to school, and their cards of admission were taken from them."50
The school as an expanding social agency also became involved in providing school nurses and lunch programs. Much of this work was the result of the settlement house movement, which sought to reform conditions among the poor. Workers in the settlement house movement campaigned for a broader view of the social functions of the school and were responsible in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu- ries for the first citywide lunch program in New York schools, the first school physi- cian (in 1897), and the first experiments in providing school nurses in Chicago.51
Kindergartens, playgrounds, showers, lunches, and nurses were recognized as giving broader social meaning and uses to the public school. Clarence Arthur Perry begins his Wider Use of the School Plant (1910) by noting, "The children who went to school back in the eighties skipped out of the school house door at half past three and scampered down the street shouting with glee. . . . Within a couple of decades all this has changed." He found that in 1910 public school buildings were "open not only days but evenings. . . . Children go to them Sat- urdays as well as Mondays, and in some places the school rooms are not left unvisited even on Sundays."52
SOCIAL CENTERS
Another important factor in the wider use of the school was concern about the loss of community. The use of the school as a social center was viewed as one means of reestablishing within an urban context a sense of community that had been lost with the passing of rural and small-town life. It was believed that the neighborhood school could be a means of organizing urban populations into a corporate body of specialized tasks and lifestyles cemented together by common allegiances. An exam- ple of this attitude is provided by J. K. Paulding, a New York writer who argued in 1898 that democracy could function only with the existence of a spirit of democratic fraternalism resulting from the unification of individual aspirations into a common way of life. He argued that the school, by opening its doors a little wider and becoming a social center, could bring in neighborhood life and create the necessary
CHAPTER 8: Growth of the Welfare Function of Schools 231
© Hulton Getty/Gamma Liaison
spirit of democratic fraternalism. An article by H. E. Scudder in the Atlantic Monthly in 1896 suggested that the school could attract more people by improving the beauty of its buildings, attaching a public library, organizing a museum and conservatory, and using its walls as a public art gallery. The author states, "The common school- house is in reality the most obvious center of national unity."53
During the 1890s, social centers developed rapidly throughout the country. New York organized its after-school recreational activities into social centers in 1897. The University Settlement in New York organized clubs in twenty-one school buildings for the specific purposes of reducing individual selfishness and promoting a spirit of social cooperation. In Chicago, social centers were estab- lished in the field houses of the park system, and neighborhood groups engaged in a variety of activities, including community orchestras and choral clubs. A local women's club in Milwaukee persuaded that city in 1907 to open school buildings for local evening meetings. When the Russell Sage Foundation surveyed the social center movement in 1913, it found that 330 of the 788 school superintendents contacted around the country reported the use of their schools as social centers. By 1920, the movement had spread to 667 school districts.54
Changes in school architecture reflected the growing commitment to the con- cept of the school as social center. One school superintendent complained to his colleagues in 1897 that it was difficult to open schools to adults because in most buildings access to assembly rooms was "gained only by climbing flights of stairs,
232 The American School
always with embarrassment and often with risk of accident from fire or other causes." His suggestion, which was incorporated into later school plans, was to construct assembly rooms on the ground floor, with easy access from the street.55
Classroom furniture also had to be changed to meet the multiple needs of the school and the adult social center. Demands were made to replace school desks bolted to the floor with flat-top desks that could be rearranged for use in club and recreational activities. By 1910, schools such as Washington Irving High School in New York were being designed specifically to function as social centers. The lobby of the school contained a neighborhood art gallery, and the auditorium provided facilities for neighborhood drama groups. Office space was set aside in the school to accommodate the staffs of local clubs and associations.
One leader of the social center movement, Edward J. Ward, believed that schools could be a means of reforming urban politics by reducing political tensions. Ward advocated the establishment of social centers in schoolhouses as centers for political discussion. He envisioned the day when voting districts would be the same as school districts and the ballot box would be placed in the schoolhouse. When this occurs, he wrote, "the schoolhouse . . . becomes, for all its possible wider uses, the real social center; and the way is clear and the means are at hand for supplying the fundamental and supreme lack in the machinery of democracy." The social center, he believed, was the key to developing political cooperation.56
As the school social center idea spread throughout the United States, it took on a variety of forms. In Chicago, the park field houses served the function of bringing the community together on a social basis, and schoolhouses were used to promote political cooperation. In 1914, the Russell Sage Foundation reported that 142 political meetings had been held in Chicago school buildings during a munic- ipal election. The civic clubs of Los Angeles fought to have polling booths and political meetings in school buildings instead of in "livery stables and small, dingy, out-of-the-way and hard-to-find places." They believed that locating the polling booth in the school would protect it from tampering by corrupt political forces.57
The social center was also seen as a means of helping immigrants adjust to urban living. For instance, the Women's Municipal League of Boston worked for the opening of social centers in the local schools as part of its more general civic work to improve the lives of immigrants. The president of the league wrote in 1912 that social centers were opened because "it is our endeavor to make our city a true home for the people, it is not enough that we should merely make it a house. . . . We must also ensure that there shall be within it recreation, enjoyment, and happiness for all."58
THE NEW CULTURE WARS
In one sense, kindergartens, social centers, playgrounds, and the wider use of the school plant were part of the new culture wars. These new functions of the pub- lic schools were intended to handle problems created by immigrants from South- ern and Eastern Europe. They were part of an effort to "Americanize" immigrants.
CHAPTER 8: Growth of the Welfare Function of Schools 233
At the time, the terms Americanize and Americanization referred to a process of deculturalization where immigrant languages and cultures were replaced by Eng- lish and Anglo-American culture. Reflecting this process of deculturalization, many schools, in a manner similar to the treatment of Native Americans, actually changed immigrant names so that they "sounded American."
In addition to trying to "Americanize" immigrant children, public schools were faced with real problems in classroom space and instruction. Investigators for the U.S. Senate Immigration Commission in 1908 found that there were more than sixty nationalities in thirty-seven cities and that 58 percent of all students had foreign-born parents. For particular cities, the percentages of students with foreign-born parents were as follows: New York, 72 percent; Chicago, 67 percent; Boston, 64 percent; Cleveland, 60 percent; and San Francisco, 58 percent.59
One response of schools to the immigrant population was to offer adult night- school classes in English, government, and naturalization. By offering this activ- ity, the schools were serving a direct need, not trying to compensate for the supposed failure of another institution. Adult night-school classes further opened the door of the schoolhouse to the community and contributed to the claim that the school was becoming the social center of urban America.
In both the adult courses and the accommodation of immigrant children dur- ing regular school hours, a tension existed between the wish to protect immigrant culture and the push for Americanization. There is little doubt that most immigrant groups flocked to the schools, but on arrival there they often found a great deal of hostility toward their language and customs. Immigrant children found their names being Anglicized and were frequently told not to speak the language of their par- ents and to forget their native customs. In these situations, Americanization meant cultural imperialism and the building of a national spirit that was suspicious of foreign countries and ways of living.
One important aspect of Americanization was a fear of radical political ideas. Many national leaders argued that ideas about socialism and communism were being brought to this country by immigrant groups. One-hundred percent Americanism came to mean opposition to radical economic and political ideologies. For example, in 1917 Cleveland's superintendent of schools, according to historian David Tyack, recommended the firing of "any teacher 'whose sympathies are proved to be with our country's enemies' (it was not necessary, he said, to express disloyalty in words, since teachers influenced pupils merely by the convictions and fundamental desires of the ... heart)."60
Therefore, Americanization continued the traditions of the common school by insisting on the creation of a unified Anglo-American culture. Also, the concept of Americanization changed the political goals of the school to include teaching against radical ideas, particularly socialism and communism. As the social center of the new urban America, the school became a bastion of Anglo-American culture and antiradicalism.
One suspects that when educators talked about the collapse of the family and community, they meant either that the style of family and community life was not to their liking or that they wanted the school to take over the social functions of those institutions. Certainly, many immigrant groups maintained strong family
234 The American School
structures and community life in urban America, but for those Americans who believed that immigrants were threatening the traditional American way of life, immigrant families and communities were considered to be deviant and in need of change.
Within the context of the preceding argument, the movement to expand the school as a social agency could have had several meanings. It could have meant that traditional institutions were indeed collapsing and the social order of the school needed to expand to replace those institutions. Or it could have meant that the immigrant forms of family and community were unacceptable and the school needed to destroy those forms by taking over their functions. The expanded social role of the school could also have been the result of a desire to exert more ratio- nal control over the social order by having government institutions assume a greater number of social functions.
Whatever the reason, by the early twentieth century the school had in fact expanded its functions into areas undreamed of in the early part of the previous century. Kindergartens, playgrounds, school showers, nurses, social centers, and Americanization programs turned the school into a central social agency of urban America. The one theme that ran through all these new school programs was the desire to maintain discipline and order in urban life. Within this framework, the school became a major agency for social control and assuring the domination of Anglo-American culture.
RESISTING SEGREGATION: AFRICAN AMERICANS
While immigrants were being Americanized, African, Mexican, Native, Asian, and Puerto Rican Americans were increasingly segregated or denied language and cultural rights in public schools. Among African Americans the major resistance to school segregation came from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). W. E. B. Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP and edi- tor of the magazine Crisis, became the leading opponent of Booker T. Washington's southern compromise. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, earned a Ph.D. at Harvard, studied in Europe, and became one of America's lead- ing sociologists. However, like most blacks in the late nineteenth and early twen- tieth centuries, he had difficulty finding a university teaching position. Some of his most famous studies were done while he taught at Atlanta University; The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study was written with the support of the University of Pennsylvania but without an appointment to its faculty. One of his major pub- lic statements attacking the arguments of Booker T. Washington is The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903.
In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois claims that Washington's compromise resulted in disaster for black people in the South: "Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things—First, political power, Second, insistence on civil rights, Third, higher education of Negro
CHAPTER 8: Growth of the Welfare Function of Schools 235
youth—and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, the accumula- tion of wealth, and the conciliation of the South." The result, Du Bois argues, would be the "disfranchisement of the Negro," the "legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro," and the "steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher education of the Negro."
Du Bois envisioned a different type of education for blacks, one that would provide leaders to protect the social and political rights of the black community and make the black population aware of the necessity for constant struggle. He also wanted to develop an Afro-American culture that would blend the African background of former slaves with American culture. In part, this was to be accom- plished by the education of black leaders.
What Du Bois hoped to accomplish through education is well described in his study of John. In the story, a southern black community raises money to send John to the North for an education. The community's hope is that he will return to teach in the local black school. After receiving his education in the North, John does return to teach. He goes to the house of the local white judge and, after making the mistake of knocking at the front door instead of the rear door, is ushered into the judge's dining room. The judge greets John with his philosophy of education: "In this country the Negro must remain subordinate, and can never expect to be [the] equal of white men." The judge describes two different ways in which blacks might be educated in the South. The first, which the judge favors, is to "teach the darkies to be faithful servants and laborers as your fathers were." The second way, the one supported by Du Bois and most feared by white southerners, is described by the judge as putting "fool ideas of rising and equality into these folks' heads, and . . . [making] them discontent and unhappy."
What was most important for Du Bois was to educate blacks to be discon- tented with their social position in the South. Unhappiness—not happiness—was his goal. Du Bois describes John, before his meeting with the judge, standing on a bluff with his younger sister and looking out over an expanse of water:
Long they stood together, peering over the gray unsettled water. "John," she said, "does it make everyone unhappy when they study and learn
lots of things?" He paused and smiled. "I am afraid it does," he said. "And, John, are you glad you studied?" "Yes," came the answer, slowly and positively. She watched the flickering lights upon the sea, and said thoughtfully, "I wish
I was unhappy—and—and," putting both arms about his neck, "I think I am, a little, John."63
Du Bois's ideal of an educated black citizenry struggling against oppression became a reality even within a segregated society and educational system. Certainly, the combination of segregated education and the lack of funding of schools serving African Americans hindered the social and economic advancement of blacks. It took more than a half century for the NAACP to win its battle against segregated educa- tion in the South. During that period of legal struggle, segregated schooling was a major factor in condemning blacks to an inferior status in society.
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THE SECOND CRUSADE FOR BLACK EDUCATION
The first crusade for black education in the South had taken place during and after the Civil War. The second crusade occurred from 1910 to the 1930s. The second crusade involved the expansion of segregated schools for African American chil- dren paid for by a combination of personal donations of time and money by black citizens, donations by private foundations, and government money. By the 1930s, through these efforts, common schools were finally established for black children. In the second crusade black southern citizens had to pay directly from their own income to build schools for their children while, at the same time, they paid local and state taxes, which went primarily to support white segregated schools.
One of the important private foundations supporting the second crusade was the Anna T. Jeanes Fund. The Jeanes Fund paid up to 84 percent of the salaries for teacher supervisors and elementary industrial education. The Jeanes teachers, as they were called, spent the majority of their time in raising money for the construction of schoolhouses and the purchase of equipment. According to James Anderson, between 1913 and 1928, Jeanes teachers raised approximately $5 million. In this respect, Jeanes teachers played an important role in helping African Americans raise the money for black education that was being denied them by state and local gov- ernments dominated by white citizens.
The Julius Rosenwald Fund, named after its founder—Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck and Company—led the campaign in building schools for black children. The first Rosenwald school was completed in 1914 in Lee County, Alabama. The construction of this one-teacher schoolhouse cost $942. Indicative of how the costs were being shared, impoverished local black residents donated $282 in cash and free labor. Local white citizens gave $360. The Rosenwald Fund gave $300.64
Between the building of the first Rosenwald school in 1914 and 1932, 4,977 rural black schools were constructed that could accommodate 663,615 students. The total expenditure for building these schools in 883 counties in fifteen south- ern states was $28,408,520. James Anderson provides the following breakdown for the financial sources of this massive building program: Rosenwald Fund— 15.36 percent; rural black people—16.64 percent; white donations—4.27 percent; and public tax funds—63.73 percent.65 According to Anderson, the public tax funds used to build the Rosenwald schools came primarily from black citizens. He argues that the majority of school taxes collected from black citizens went to the support of schools for white children. Anderson writes, "During the period 1900 to 1920, every southern state sharply increased its tax appropriations for building schoolhouses, but virtually none of this money went for black schools."66 Booker T. Washington complained, "The money [taxes] is actually being taken from the colored people and given to white schools."67
In reality, because of the source of funding, many of these public black schools were owned by local black citizens. One analysis of school expenditures in the South concluded that blacks owned 43.9 percent, or 1,816, of a total of
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4,137 schools. Many of the schools identified as being in the public domain were paid for through the voluntary contributions of black citizens. 8 Therefore, the second crusade for black education in the South involved a great deal of self-help from the black community. It was through the struggles and sacrifices of the black community that by the 1930s African American children in the South had a via- ble system of education. The major drawback to this system was segregation and unequal financial support by state and local governments.
Despite the lack of financial equality between segregated schools, many schools serving black students provided an excellent education. In her study of segregated schools in Caswell County, North Carolina, Vanessa Siddle Walker documents that despite the limited resources resulting from unequal funding, the local African American public school provided an excellent education. Part of the reason was the sense of community created by parental participation in the finan- cial support of the school. In addition, teachers and administers in the school cared about the success of their students and worked to ensure their academic success. Walker concludes, "Caring adults gave individual concern, personal time, and so forth to help ensure a learning environment in which African American children would succeed. Despite the difficulties they faced and the poverty with which they had to work, it must be said that they experienced no poverty of spirit."6 Walker cites other studies that found positive academic outcomes from segregated black schools because teachers and parents shared a common commitment to the success of their students.
Of course, Walker's conclusions raise the same issues that African American parents faced in Boston in the early nineteenth century. Segregated schools meant unequal funding and poor facilities but included teachers interested in the success of their students. Integrated schools meant equal funding and facilities but also raised the possibility that white teachers might not be dedicated to ensuring the success of their black students.
RESISTING SEGREGATION: MEXICAN AMERICANS
The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) led the resistance of Mexican Americans to the increasing segregation of their children. According to Guadalupe San Miguel Jr. in "Let All of Them Take Heed": Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910-1981, one of the most discriminatory acts against the children of Mexicans was the nonenforcement of compulsory school laws.70 A survey of one Texas county in 1921 found only 30.7 percent of Mexican school-age children in school. In another Texas county in the 1920s, school authorities admitted that they enforced school attendance on Anglo children but not on Mexican children. San Miguel quotes one school authority from this period: "The whites come all right except one whose parents don't appreciate education. We don't enforce the attendance on the whites because we would have to on the Mexicans." One school superintendent explained that
238 The American School
he always asked the local school board if they wanted the Mexican children in school. Any enforcement of the compulsory education law against the wishes of the school board, he admitted, would probably cost him his job.72
Those Mexican children who did attend school faced segregation and an edu- cation designed, in a manner similar to the programs applied to Indians, to rid them of their native language and customs. School segregation for Mexican chil- dren spread rapidly throughout Texas and California. The typical pattern was for a community with a large Mexican school population to erect a separate school for Mexican children. For instance, in 1891 the Corpus Christi, Texas, school board denied admission of Mexican children to their "Anglo schools" and built a separate school.
In Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation, Gilbert Gonzalez finds that the typical attitude in California schools was reflected in the April 1921 minutes of the Ontario, California, Board of Education: "Mr. Hill made the recommenda- tion that the board select two new school sites; one in the southeastern part of the town for a Mexican school; the other near the Central School."7 Gonzalez reports that a survey conducted in the mid-1930s found that 85 percent of the districts investigated in the Southwest were segregated.74 In All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975, Charles Wollenberg quotes a California educator writing in 1920: "One of the first demands made from a community in which there is a large Mexican population is for a separate school."75 A Los Angeles school official admitted that pressure from white citizens resulted in certain neighborhood schools being built to contain the majority of Mexican students.76
Rationalized by outright racist attitudes toward Mexican Americans, school segregation was justified by the same argument used to justify isolating southeast- ern Indians in Indian Territory. Educators argued that the segregation of Mexican children would provide the opportunity to, in Gonzalez's words, "Americanize the child in a controlled linguistic and cultural environment, and . . . to train Mexicans for occupations considered open to, and appropriate for, them."
Segregation also served the purpose, according to David Montejano, of main- taining white supremacy. Anglo and Mexican children knew that segregation was intended to separate the superior from the inferior. In addition, Mexican schools were in poorer physical condition, Mexican children used books discarded by Anglo schools, and Mexican teams could not participate in Anglo athletic leagues. The sense of inferiority that children learned in the segregated educational system was reinforced in adult life by the refusal of Anglo restaurants to serve Mexicans and by segregated housing.78
Those Mexican children attending segregated schools were put through a decul- turalization program similar to the one for the Indians isolated in Indian Territory and in boarding schools. The program was designed to strip away Mexican values and culture and replace the use of Spanish with English. The term most frequently used in the early twentieth century for the process of deculturalization was Ameri- canization. The Americanization process for Mexicans should not be confused with the Americanization programs that children of European immigrants encountered in schools. As Gilbert Gonzalez argues, the Americanization of Mexicans, as opposed
CHAPTER 8: Growth of the Welfare Function of Schools 239
to Europeans, took place in segregated school systems. In addition, the assimilation of Mexicans was made difficult by the nature of the rural economy, which locked Mexicans into segregated farmwork. Anglos also showed greater disdain for Mexican culture than they did for European cultures.7
An important element in the Americanization of Mexican schoolchildren, as it was for Indians, was eliminating the speaking of their native language. Educa- tors argued that learning English was essential to assimilation and the creation of a unified nation. In addition, language was considered related to values and cul- ture. Changing languages, it was assumed, would cause a cultural revolution among Mexican Americans. Typical of this attitude was a Texas school superin- tendent quoted by Gonzalez as saying that "a Mexican child 'is foreign in his thinking and attitudes' until he learns to 'think and talk in English.'"80
In 1918, Texas passed legislation with stricter requirements for the use of English in public schools. The legislation made it a criminal offense to use any language but English in the schools. In addition, the legislation required that school personnel, including teachers, principals, custodians, and school board members, use only English when conducting school business.
Many Anglos believed that Mexican culture and values (like Indian culture and values) discouraged the exercise of economic entrepreneurship and cooperation required in an advanced corporate society (as I discussed in the previous chapter, many whites believed that the communal lifestyle of Indians hindered their advance- ment in U.S. society). Mexicans were criticized as having a fatalistic acceptance of the human condition, being self-pitying, and being unable to work with others in large organizations. Also, many Anglos felt that Mexicans were overly attached to their families and to small organizations such as local clubs.82
The attempted deculturalization of Mexicans did not always extend to food, music, and dance. Advocates of cultural democracy felt that such superficial aspects of culture could be maintained while attempts were made to socialize Mexican children into an entrepreneurial spirit, or what was called an "achievement concept."83
Most Mexican children did not encounter these deculturalization programs because of a combination of lack of enforcement of compulsory education laws and the necessity for children to help support their families. In addition, there were reports of Mexican children dropping out of school because of the anti- Mexican bias of the curriculum—particularly in Texas, where in history instruc- tion stress was placed on the Texas defeat of Mexico. In addition, many children of migrant farmworkers received little opportunity to attend school. In some areas of California, state laws on school attendance were routinely violated by local school boards to ensure the availability of children for farmwork. In 1928, with support from the state, the Fresno County, California, superintendent of schools opened a special migratory school. Children attended between 7:30 dip Wand 12:30 s lp 1 and then joined their parents in the fields. This five-hour school day was in clear violation of state law on the number of hours of attendance, but the California government never enforced this requirement on the migratory schools, and the five-hour day became typical for schools serving migrant children. In some parts of California, migrant children were completely denied an education.
240 The American School
In the 1930s, public schools in Ventura County, California, displayed signs reading "No Migratory Children Wanted Here."85
The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)
Many in the Mexican American community protested the denial of education to their children, the existence of school segregation, and the attempts at decultural- ization. In 1929, representatives from a variety of Mexican American organizations met in Corpus Christi, Texas, to form LULAC. This organization was primarily composed of middle-class Mexican Americans, as opposed to Mexican farm laborers and migratory workers. Membership was restricted to U.S. citizens.86
LULAC adopted a code that reflected the desire of middle-class Mexican Americans to integrate the culture of Mexico with that of the United States. The code attempted to balance respect for U.S. citizenship with maintenance of cul- tural traditions. On the one hand, the code asked members to "Respect your citi- zenship, converse it; honor your country, maintain its traditions in the minds of your children, incorporate yourself in the culture and civilization." On the other hand, the code told members to "Love the men of your race, take pride in your origins and keep it immaculate; respect your glorious past and help to vindicate your people."87 Clearly, LULAC was committed to a vision of the United States that was multicultural and multilingual. In contrast to the public schools, which were trying to eradicate Mexican culture and the use of Spanish, LULAC favored bilingualism and instruction in the cultural traditions of the United States and Mexico. The LULAC code called on members to "Study the past of your people, or the country to which you owe your citizenship; learn to handle with purity the two most essential languages, English and Spanish."88
As an organization, LULAC was dedicated to fighting discrimination against Mexican Americans, particularly in the form of school segregation. One of the founders of LULAC, J. Luz Saenz, argued that discrimination and the lack of equal educational opportunities were hindering integration of Mexicans into U.S. society. In summarizing the position of LULAC, Saenz stated, "As long as they do not educate us with all the guarantees and opportunities for free participation in all ... activities . . . as long as they wish to raise up on high the standard of vxs uhp df I #• iftidf hvft qftlf f r xq\$t i#r or u#. . . so much will they put off our conversion . . . [to] full citizens."89
LULAC's first challenge to school segregation occurred in 1928 with the fil- ing of a complaint against the Charlotte, Texas, Independent School District. In this case, a child of unknown racial background adopted by a Mexican family was refused admission to the local Anglo elementary school and was assigned to the Mexican school. Her father argued that because of her unknown racial back- ground, she should be put into the Anglo school. The state admitted that the local school district did not have the right to segregate Mexican children. Local school officials, however, justified the segregation of Mexican children because they required special instruction in English. After determining that the child spoke fluent English, the state school superintendent ordered the local school district to
CHAPTER 8: Growth of the Welfare Function of Schools 241
enroll the student in the Anglo school. Although the ruling had the potential to open the doors of Anglo schools to Mexican children who spoke fluent English, it did little to end segregation.90
LULAC's second case involving school segregation occurred in 1930, when the Del Rio, Texas, Independent School District proposed a bond election to construct and improve school buildings. Included in the proposal were improve- ments for the Mexican school. Mexican American parents in the district com- plained that the proposal continued the practice of segregating their children from other students. The local superintendent defended segregation as necessary because Mexican students had irregular attendance records and special language problems. The court accepted the arguments of local school authorities that segregation was necessary for educational reasons. But the court did state that it was unconstitu- tional to segregate students on the basis of national origin. This decision presented LULAC with the difficult problem of countering the educational justifications used for segregation. At a special 1931 session, LULAC members called for sci- entific studies of arguments that segregation is necessary for instruction.91
While LULAC focused most of its efforts on school segregation, there was a concern about what was perceived to be the anti-Mexican bias of textbooks. In 1939, the state president of LULAC, Ezequiel Salinas, attacked the racism and distortions of Mexicans in history textbooks. Significant changes in the racial content of textbooks, however, did not occur until the full impact of the civil rights movement hit the publishing industry in the 1960s.92
While LULAC was struggling to end segregation in Texas, other Mexican American organizations in California were attacking the same problem. By the 1930s, Mexican children were the most segregated group in the state. The California situation was somewhat different from that of Texas, because of a 1935 state law allowing for the segregation of Chinese, Japanese, "Mongolians," and Indians. Although Indians born in the United States were exempt from this law, the state did allow (as discussed in the previous chapter), segregation of Indians who were not "descendants of the original American Indians of the United States." According to Charles Wollenberg, "In this torturous and indirect fashion, the 1935 law seemed to allow for segregation of Mexican 'Indians,' but not of Mexican 'whites.'"93
The struggle to end segregation played a major role in the civil rights move- ment of the post-World War II period. The efforts of the NAACP and LULAC finally resulted in the end of legal segregation of African American and Mexican American students. While the civil rights movement brought the end of segregation, it also opened the door to feelings of racial and cultural pride.
NATIVE AMERICAN BOARDING SCHOOLS
During the 1920s, a variety of investigators of Indian boarding schools were hor- rified by the conditions they found. At the Rice Boarding School in Arizona, Red Cross investigators found that children were fed "bread, black coffee, and syrup