The Paradox of Progressivism

A Historiography of a Concept and a Political Movement

originally written 2011

What Was the Progressive Movement?

John R. Commons used the term “Progressive” in the 1890s as an idea foreshadowing a new social and political orientation that was challenging laissez-faire individualism, but he was not explicit about what the term meant.  By 1897 Albion Small noticed a new reformist impulse in the U.S. and a rising “social movement,” but was not sure if a few initial stirrings of reform would lead towards a programmatic platform that could create widespread social change.[i]  Daniel T. Rodgers has written that the word “progressive” was used by Woodrow Wilson in 1911, who prefaced its political meaning during the 1910 electoral campaigns by saying it was still a “new term.”  The rhetorical identification of a Progressive “movement” seemed to have arisen by around 1912 along with its ideological counterpart, “progressivism,” which was used as a political orientation in opposition to the democratic, republican, and socialist parties.  The prominence of these terms were due to the third-way “Progressive” Party in the presidential campaign of 1912, but these terms did not become associated with a widespread reformist identification until later in the decade.[ii] 

Benjamin Parke DeWitt published a polemic called The Progressive Movement: A Non-partisan Comprehensive Discussion of Current Tendencies in American Politics by 1915.  He tried to explain the Progressive ideology and political platform in terms of a struggle between the oppressed “people” and the sinister political and economic “interests.”  By the time the so-called “Progressive movement” had largely come to an end after World War I, there was still no agreement on what exactly “Progressive” meant or what the movement was about.  In 1924 Nation journalist William Hard held a contest to see if his readers could define “Progressivism.”  No consensus emerged.[iii]  During that same year, long time self-identified Progressive, Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, initiated a “new Progressive Party” (incorporating labor and socialists) and was able to win 16% of the vote (the second largest third-party percentage of the 20th century, next only to the first Progressive Party of Roosevelt, which garnered over 4 million popular votes and 88 electoral votes).  The year 1932 brought out an obituary for Progressivism in John Chamberlain’s Farewell to Reform: The Rise, Life and Decay of the Progressive Mind in America. 

During the 1950s and 60s the term “Progressivism” stood as the catch all concept of historians and political philosophers, which was used to define a broad age of liberal reform following agrarian uprisings (“Populism”) and prefacing the New Deal.  By the 1970’s U.S. historians found the early 20th century social movement(s) ambiguous, inconsistent, paradoxical, contradictory, complex, and beyond the limited capacity of the term “Progressive.”[iv]  Some called for the dismissal and burial of the term.  But the idea survived and by 2003 Oxford University Press published yet another volume on the “Progressive Movement.”  We will look at selective portraits over the last 50 years within the historiography on the “Progressive Movement” to see how “Progressivism” has been defined in order to evaluate its usefulness as a concept for understanding U.S. reformist programs during the first decades of 20th century.    

Richard Hofstadter was one of the first major historians of the “Progressive” period in U.S. history and also an early conceptualizer of “progressivism.”  He won the Pulitzer Prize in history for his treatment of the subject, The Age of Reform (1955).  In this work he sought a “broader” definition of the term “progressive” and located its essence within the “impulse toward criticism and change” which was emblematic of middle-class programs for social and economic reform around the turn of the 20the century.  He was careful to point out that both the larger term “Progressive” and the more specific “Progressive Movement” were “rather vague and not altogether cohesive or consistent” conceptions.  He focused on the “ideas” of this vague and inconsistent movement, which was based on the notion of “self-reformation.”[v]

Hofstadter described the United States economic, legal, and political system of the 19th century as “reliably conservative.”  He also noted that reactions against this conservative system of government during the 19th century were “popular,” “democratic,” and “progressive.”  Hofstadter labeled the period from 1890 to 1940 as an “age of reform,” whereby, a “surge” of popular, democratic, and progressive reactions were sounded and corresponding social movements set forth.  Hofstadter set the progressive period between two other periods of reform in U.S. history: 1) an earlier period of agrarian uprising, especially the “populist” movement, which had its origins in Jacksonian politics and reached it peak in the 1890s; 2) the progressive period, which properly congealed by 1900; and 3) the later initiative called the New Deal, originating in the 1930s, which was less programmatic, more pragmatic, and more Federally centered than previous reform periods.  Hofstadter suggested that this long string of reformism had stalled by the 1950s (he was writing his book in mid decade), partly due to the social and political institutionalization of reform, which quite literally internalized the progressive-liberal ethos into the U.S. system of government and, thereby, argued Hofstadter, the progressive-liberal ethos as a political program became more conservative so as to preserve its central position within the socio-political arena.[vi]

Hofstadter invoked several definitions and conceptions of “progressivism” and “progressives,” but there were many common themes in his work.  The Progressive Ethos was a broad “impulse” of “criticism and change” that became the “whole tone” of socio-political ferment after 1900.  Its essence was an imprecise and nostalgic call for a “later-day Protestant revival” that preached “self-reformation,” “economic individualism,” “political democracy,” “morality,” and “civic purity.”  It was also a reactionary push against concentrated economic power, inequality, and corruption, while at the same time progressivism was a narrow-minded attempt to counter industrial inefficiency, urban social disorder, and immigration.    

The Progressive actors were largely “genteel,” “proper,” and “respectable” middle class reformers with an “enthusiasm” for social and economic change.  They had humanitarian “vision” and “courage,” but they were not radicals and they preferred talk of “moral values” instead of initiating material improvement.  Hofstadter also claimed that progressives were a group of “responsible” WASP “elites” who embarked on a “status revolution”[vii] to regain “deference and power,” which had been threatened by corporate capitalism, labor organizations, and ethnic political machines. 

Hofstadter characterized the Progressive Movement as “rather vague,” “not altogether cohesive or consistent,” “mild and judicious,” “moderate,” “safe,” and “constructive.”  This movement sought a “widespread” effort including “the greater part of society” for a “moderate” and “constructive” change in the social and political system. The movement seemed to prefer “exposure,” “information,” and “exhortation” to programmatic action and more equitable restructuring.  Hofstadter noted the “radical” tenor of progressive criticisms, but he pointed out a “disparity between the boldness of their means and the tameness of their ends.”  He criticized the Progressive Movement as a “moral crusade” under the spell of an “evangelistic psychology” that often devolved into a “retrograde,” “delusive,” “comic,” and sometimes “vicious” bit of political parody.  Hofstadter made it clear that there was much about the Progressive Movement that could be considered illiberal and even unprogressive by its own standards.[viii]

Another major historian of the Progressive period is Robert H. Wiebe whose The Search for Order, 1877 – 1920 (1967) has been widely cited in the literature on the subject.  Wiebe did not use the “Progressive” periodization and he did not refer to Progressives or Progressivism in his book, although it was mentioned in the “Introduction” by David Donald.  The only time Wiebe used the term “Progressive” was in relation to the 3rd party during the 1912 presidential election, the “Progressive Party.”  Wiebe’s book focused instead on what he terms “the new middle class.”  This group of people congealed into what could be called a “class” by the late 19th century and this “class” that Wiebe examines was conceptually similar to the “Progressives” that Hofstadter described.  This new middle class was composed of educated and cultured professionals and specialists who were “clustered” in urban areas in the United States by the turn of the 20th century.  These educated professionals had an optimistic “faith” in scientific and bureaucratic rationality and they tended to use this discursive method to focus on the country’s “evils” with an “earnest desire to remake the world upon their private models.”  The primary goal of this new middle class was a desire for order, unity, efficiency, and cohesion in society, politics, industry, and urban development, both nationally and also internationally, in short they wanted a national – if not global – “frictionless bureaucracy.”  When order could not be achieved rationally, these professionals often resorted to “traditional techniques” to establish order, like force or exclusion: The new middle class would “draw a line around the good society and dismiss the remainder…separate the legitimate from the illegitimate.”  This new middle class used their scientific rationality to facilitate a new technocratic and managerial framework with which to gain power so as to “reorder” society, industry, and state according to what they considered universal, scientific principles of natural law.[ix]

In 1968 James Weinstein wrote an important book and widely cited book on the influence of corporate capitalism on Progressive reform, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State: 1900-1918.[x]  Weinstein demonstrated a “conscious and successful effort to guide and control the economic and social policies of federal, state, and municipal governments by various business groupings in their own long-range interest as they perceived it.”  Liberalism changed from its 19th century roots of individualism and laissez faire to an early 20th century “new liberalism” of corporate social responsibility and the rationalized expansion of the regulatory, “liberal” state.  Many business leaders in the late 19th and early 20th century made a conscious decision to use liberal reform “as a means of securing the existing social [and economic] order.”  Liberal reforms were meant to incorporate various socialist and labor initiatives, while delegitimizing socialist and labor movements, and liberal reforms sought to stabilize, rationalize, and expand the apparatus of the state as a method business friendly of market regulation, which corporate interests could oversee or control.  A member of the National Civic Federation and a utilities magnate, Samuel Insull, argued in 1909 that corporate leaders should “help shape the right kind of regulation” before “the wrong kind [was] forced upon him.”  At the Conference of Republicans of the State of New York in 1913, Elihu Root, also a member of the NCF, argued that the Republicans needed to “meet industrial and social demands of modern civilization, so far as they are reasonably consistent with our institutions.”  Paraphrasing Theodore Roosevelt, Weinstein argued that by the 1920s many corporation leaders began to see that “social reform was truly conservative.”  The rhetoric, legislation, oversight, and enforcement of worker collectives, trust regulation, workers compensation, reduction of the work day and work week, and wage increases could all be managed by corporate interests so as to safeguard the long term profits of corporate and monopoly capitalism from the more radical agitation of socialists and labor unions.[xi]  And as long as corporate leaders were willing to keep up a rhetorical front of corporate responsibility and regulation then political leaders like Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, Taft, and even Franklin Roosevelt were willing to conflate (using the rhetoric of “hearty cooperation”) national with corporate and even monopoly interests.  Even when truly concerned reformers like Frank P. Walsh tried to outline progressive industrial reforms, “the proposals were made mostly by men whose conscious purpose was to help the working man, while stabilizing and strengthening the corporate system,” which lead to the “rise of a new corporate oligarchy.”[xii] 

By 1970 “Progressivism” was being reexamined by historians.  In “An Obituary for ‘The Progressive Movement,’” Peter Filene called the whole conception of Progressivism and the Progressive Movement into question.  He argued that what had been commonly called “The Progressive Movement” never actually happened.  He said that there was never a monolithic and unified movement working towards a clear, let alone agreed upon, social and political program.  The notion of a unified movement, Filene argued, was a “mirage.”  The concept of a “Progressive Movement” was a “dead end” because the data on reformers during the period from 1890 to 1930 “stubbornly spill[s] over the edges” of the concept of “Progressivism:” “The more historians learn, the farther they move from consensus.”  Filene argued that just because “many Americans in the early 20th century were ‘reformers’” does not mean that “these Americans joined together in a ‘reform movement.’”  Filene argued, “The evidence points away from convenient synthesis and toward multiplicity” – social reform in the U.S. at the turn of the 20the century was “ambiguous, inconsistent, [and] moved by agents and forces more complex than a progressive movement.” 

And further, Filene argued, if there was a “progressive” ideology that united some reformers, it was “at best” “heterogeneous” and “lacked unanimity of purpose either on a programmatic or on a philosophic level.”  Filene even cited Michael Rogin’s 1967 work The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter whose research questioned whether the Progressive Party could even be considered “progressive” based upon its diverse membership and contradictory platforms.  Filene ended his article by focusing on the “diversity” of reformers during the period and the conflict and consensus between these diverse groups.  He argued for a conception of “shifting coalitions around different issues” by which diverse reformers and reform groups practiced “political factionalism” and “ideological improvisation” in broad and contradictory efforts at reforming U.S. society, culture, and government.[xiii]

In response to Filene’s charge, three respected and widely published scholars in the area of early 20th century U.S. history published Progressivism (1977).  In this book John C. Burnham, John D. Buenker, and Robert M. Crunden each drafted a statement and a rejoinder to discuss the usefulness and accuracy of “Progressivism” as a tool for understanding early 20th century political and social reform in the U.S.[xiv]

In the first essay John C. Burnham argued that Filene’s “obituary” was “premature” because Filene along with other scholars had focused too much on particular aspects of the diverse political and local history of the period, which “ended up refining progressivism out of existence.”  Burnham argued that “Progressivism” needed to be re-evaluated and he suggested two new ways to conceptualize the term: 1) the “coalescing” of a number of reformist streams that “reinforced” each other, “cumulating” into “what contemporaries recognized as progressivism;” and 2) specific socio-political “changes” that actually occurred around the turn of the 20th century.[xv]   

Burnham invoked Clyde Griffen’s concept of a “progressive ethos,” which was defined as an “an idealism marked by the ‘juxtaposition of a practical piece-meal approach to reform with a religious or quasi-religious vision of democracy.’”[xvi]  Burnham argued that this “progressive ethos,” an optimistic and scientific “moral fervor” to change the world, sparked a “progressive movement” around 1907-08 when journalistic criticism gave way to direct action and, thereby, inspired a “confluence of specific reform streams.”  These reform streams were primarily based within non-governmental voluntary organizations because progressives were “ambivalent” if not “mistrustful” of government action.[xvii]  Burnham argues that while “concrete achievements” outside of formal organizational efforts (membership lists, meetings, organizational literature) are “hard to demonstrate,” the membership numbers and sheer diversity of organizations was testament to the “awesome demonstration of the power of determined private citizens.”  Progressivism was also a “practical evangelism” based on professionalism, efficiency, expertise, and science, which lead to an “ideal of unselfish service and efficiency,” which in turn manifested itself in programs providing care, service, and protection.  These aid programs, carried out primarily by voluntary organizations, sought to reform behavior and change people – socially, politically, culturally, morally, hygienically, and linguistically.  Often reform organizations used education and persuasion to bring about this change, but coercion was not out of the question, especially when progressives thought reform was necessarily in the best interests of the recipient.

Robert M. Crunden’s “Essay”[xviii] drew on the work of Eric Erikson[xix] and argued that “progressivism” was a “frame of mind” or “frame of reference” composed of basic “moral and emotional attitudes” that many of the “leaders” of the reform period shared.  Crunden believed that Progressivism was not “specifically political or social, but rather cultural” to which he added, “progressivism was essentially religious” – a “form of displaced Protestantism:” Progressivism was the “spirit” and the “motivation” that inspired reformers.  Crunden defined a Progressive as “a person of strongly religious upbringing who displaced the moral concerns of his youth onto the very real social, industrial, political and aesthetic problems of his maturity, and who attempted to solve these public and personal problems within a Protestant, moral frame of reference.”  Crunden held up Jane Addams and John Dewey as “psychological paradigms of the progressive experience.”  Crunden also quotes Frederic C. Howe, a self-described reformer, who earlier wrote about the Progressive’s “evangelistic psychology:”

“I was conformed to my generation and made to share its moral standards and ideals…early assumptions as to virtue and vice, goodness and evil remained in my mind long after I had tried to discard them.  This is, I think, the most characteristic influence of my generation.  It explains the nature of our reforms, the regulatory legislation in morals and economics, our belief in men rather than in institutions and our messages to other peoples…all a part of that evangelistic psychology that makes America what she is.”[xx]

While Crunden argued that Progressives were primarily motivated by religious and psychological concerns, he did not discount or deny that other factors, like economical or political motivations, also played a part.  Crunden argued that many historians mistake economic and political motivations as the whole story.  Crunden argued that the Progressive Movement can best be understood in relation to the “psychological needs of the reformer.”

Crunden’s essay in Progressivism was expanded several years later into a book, Ministers of Reform: The Progressives’ Achievement in American Civilization, 1889 – 1920 (1982).  In this work Crunden again argued that Progressivism was an “ethos,” a “dominant national mood,” and a “system of values,” which grew out of the individual psychological needs of a culturally transitioning and professionalizing middle class.  He argued that Progressives shared no single political or social platform nor were they members of a single reform movement.  Progressives shared “moral values” and a commitment to the “spiritual reformation” of American democracy, and while the Progressive ethos often seemed “amorphous, inchoate, and difficult to define,” it was bounded by a Protestant and democratic discourse and infused by a moral fervor to reform all facets of U.S. society.  Crunden denied that there was a “progressive era,” and instead focused on three generations of U.S. reformism: liberal precursors of Progressivism [reformers born before 1854], 1st generation Progressives [reformers born between 1854 – 1874], and 2nd generation Progressives [reformers born between 1874 – 1894].  Crunden’s book makes several historical character sketches of individual Progressives, like Jane Addams, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and George Herron, in order to describe how a “progressive ethos” infused these individuals’ specific reformist impulse.[xxi]           

John D. Buenker’s “Essay” in Progressivism[xxii] marked a growing divergence on the subject.  He stood in agreement with Filene’s “shifting coalitions” theory and against the “ethos” theory of scholars like Burnham and Crunden.  Buenker argued that since “Progressivism” had been defined so many ways it had lost clear meaning except in relation to a specific political party and, thus, Buenker claimed, “as a description of either an ideology or a political program, I find it worthless and misleading.”  Buenker argued that trying to define Progressivism as a “common set of values” was disingenuous because it either gets defined too broadly (and thus just about every middle class person at the turn of the century could be described as “Progressive”) or it gets defined too narrowly (and thus becomes “ambiguous” and “contradictory” in relation to specific individuals). 

Buenker argued that there were many Progressive populations and programs and each had a different set of values.  Thus he believed that Filene’s “shifting coalitions” conception seemed the most appropriate theory with which to describe the various early 20th century reform movement(s).  Buenker argued that the idea of shifting coalitions was a more “comprehensive explanation” because it can take into account diverse reform movements composed of diverse people with diverse motives who may have on certain occasions accommodated or cooperated on specific reform issues: “the politics of compromise, conciliation, and coalition,” Buenker noted, “have been the hallmark of the American system from the beginning.”  A focus on shifting coalitions put primary emphasis on the political arena as the plane where compromise, conciliation, and coalition took place.[xxiii]  But he also noted that individual reformers had complex identities and conflicting social relationships, which in turn further fractured any coherent notion of personal “ethos” that a historian might construct.  Buenker demanded a complex reckoning of the specific social, cultural and political relationships and identities of individual reformers both prior to and during public reform debates and policy coalitions.[xxiv]

Daniel T. Rogers offered a look at the concept of “progressivism” in 1982.[xxv]  He noted that the term went from “one of the central organizing principles of American history” to a “corpse that would not lie down.”  The debate of the meaning of progressivism was “acute and troubling.”  He described the literature on the subject after 1970 as moving away from the ethos of Progressivism and actors in a Progressive movement to its “context” – the “structures of politics, power, and ideas within which the era’s welter of tongues and efforts and ‘reforms’ took place.”  The “fundamental fact” researchers of the 1970s focused on was the “explosion of scores of aggressive, politically active pressure groups” in an era of “shifting, ideologically fluid, issue-focused coalitions, all competing for the reshaping of American society” of which the Progressives were only one group.  Actually, Rogers argued, the group of reformers called the “Progressives” were really many distinct individuals and associations that “shared no common party or organization,” had “deep disagreements,” but from time to time shared ideas and rhetorical strategies.[xxvi]  Progressive politics, like other forms of politics in the era, were “coalition politics, prone to internal fissures.”  And this was perhaps one of the distinctive features of the era, the “rise of modern, weak-party, issue-focused politics.”  The other distinctive feature was the “revolution” in “social organization:” “the eclipse of the local, informal group” and its “replacement by vastly bigger, bureaucratically structured formal organizations,” most importantly the business corporation and the regulatory state.  Rogers spent some time reviewing the literature of New Left historians like Gabriel Kolko and James Weinstein whose research described the “new corporate phase of capitalism,” which allowed the corporation to become the “dominant” economic force of the 20th century.     

In 1983 Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick published a short but detailed historiographical summary of the literature on Progressivism up to 1980.  Link and McCormick organized the previous scholarly literature into six schools of analysis:

1) a conflict between “ordinary” and wealthy Americans

2) the continuation of a long tradition of agrarian protest

3) an urban, WASP, professional, middle-class movement trying to organize society, thereby, remedying industrialization, urbanization, and immigration

4) an urban, WASP, professional, middle-class movement on an intolerant moral crusade to remake America inspired mostly by their own personal problems

5) reformers from the “wealthiest” groups of society out to address social ills

6)  diverse reform groups with divergent missions who often formed “shifting coalitions” to address and combat particular issues

For all six schools, Link and McCormick warned, historians have not often separated “purposes, rationale, and results” in their research.  These are three very different yet mutually informative categories of analysis.  The authors pointed out how many historical studies of the period have exaggerated a single category of analysis to the exclusion of others. 

Despite all the diversity on the subject, Link and McCormick did offer their own summation of “Progressivism.”  They noted there was “no unified movement,” but many “diverse” and “convulsive reform movements” with many diverse and contradictory goals that came through the U.S. between the 1890s and 1917.  These reform movements were typically led by “crusading” middle- and upper-class, native-born, professional Americans who sought in one way or another to address and ameliorate specific social ills, especially those social problems resulting from urbanization and industrialization.  The typical Progressive reform pattern began with investigation of a problem, which led to organizing a response, which in turn led to educating the citizenry, and often ended with the pinnacle of Progressive reform – legislation: Reformers “assumed that passing a law was equivalent to solving a problem and that government officials could be entrusted to enforce the measure in a progressive spirit.”   And while different reform movements and leaders articulated distinctive discourses of social justice, they were all usually “simplistic, traditional, moralistic” and programmatically warranted some kind of narrowly defined social control.  Specifically, the authors pointed out an often neglected aspect of Progressivism: “coercive” Progressives.

Coercive Progressive programs sought to impose social control and they took various forms, like the White Jim Crow movement in the South, Americanization programs, and moral reforms such as temperance and prohibition.  While they made many references within the literature to the problematic usage of “Progressive,” Link and McCormick argued in passing, “it might be better to avoid the terms progressive and progressivism altogether, but they are too deeply embedded in the language of contemporaries and historians to be ignored.”[xxvii]

In 1987 Nell Irvin Painter published her award winning treatment of the Progressive Era, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877 – 1919.[xxviii]  She analyzed the politics of the era via a “hybrid political-labor history” framework.  This schema allowed her to focus on the “conflict between various groups, classes, and competing ideals,” which morphed into a pitched battle between “partisans of democracy” and “protectors of hierarchy” – “the struggle over the distribution of wealth and power.”  This great political conflict and struggle caused enormous amounts of “fear…plain, stark fear” in the hearts and minds of the middle- and upper-class.  Painter argued that this fear “lay at the core” of many “progressive reforms.”  The table below displays the large gap between the very rich (0.01%), the rich (11%), and the rest of the country (88%).  The great extremes of wealth caused by capitalism and industrialization became a point of concern for the great majority who owned less than 15% of the national wealth. 

Painter stressed that while income does provide the “single clearest indicator of class standing,” the notion of class needed to be seen as a complex, “fluid” and ever changing classification, whereby there was no single “middle class,” but rather “middle classes” (and also “many ethnicities and races”).  Those elite classes with the most at stake and thereby the most influence liked to put forth ideological arguments for the “identity of interest.”  This belief conceptualized society as a smoothly functioning organism wherein the interests of the great capitalists and property owners were supposedly the best interests of all in society and in harmony with “laws of God or Science.”  Reformers acting as “democratizers” put forth a counter-conception of society.  Seeing their own middle-class or working-class interests at odds with those of capitalists and industrialists, democratizers saw society torn by a “conflict of interests.”  Reformers often, but not always, tried to point out the interests of the “disadvantaged” within the social system and thereby argue for “the ideal of equity” and democracy, in order to confront the dangerous extremes of wealth and privilege.  But lurking at the periphery of all calls for reform was the specter of working class unrest, which from time to time would boil into a froth and cause conflicts of interest to turn into real (and often violent) social and political struggles for power.  The so called “Progressive Era” was marked by a widespread call for reform and social change, however, as Painter pointed out, “the broadening consensus that change was necessary did not include agreement on the direction or extent of these changes.”[xxix] 

Perhaps the most powerful voice of reform came from educated and elite men who wanted a more “clean, efficient government” operated by a rationalized bureaucratic machinery and run by an advanced cadre of elite professionals.  Painter argued that reform initiatives during the period were often very “ambiguous” and rarely a “straightforward story of altruism” because “nativism, racism, and sexism” pervaded both the reformist impulses and the reformist programs of these educated elites.  By the early 20th century many middle class and agrarian reformers, including the so-classed Progressives (like the Progressive Party’s presidential candidate, Teddy Roosevelt), saw the United Stats as standing on the threshold of “Armageddon” with the evils of plutocratic industrial power on one side and the evils of the violent mob on the other.  Progressives under the banners of “New Nationalism” or “New Freedom” called for the regulation of society and the economy by an empowered and enlightened federal government which would act as a disinterested arbitrator between conflicting political factions, like labor and capital (of course more radical voices pointed out the impossibility of a disinterested federal government as federal policy was often in the hands of industrial capitalists and their appointed voices in the Congress).  Teddy Roosevelt succinctly summarized the ideals of these Progressive reformers: “the object of the government is the welfare of the people.  The material progress and prosperity of a nation are desirable chiefly so far as they lead to the moral and material welfare of all good citizens.”[xxx]       

The most frightening voice of reform came from the laboring classes and political radicals who often spoke in the name of working class interests.  Often disposed and exploited, lacking any real propertied interest in the social order, workers expressed their frustration through “strikes, boycotts, and cooperative enterprises” in order to pool their collective strength as a means to gain bargaining leverage with their industrial masters.  It was not until the late 19th century that workers and radicals, especially socialists, began turning to the political process and electoral politics as a way of “influencing” the U.S. economy and factory workplaces.  Labor and Populist leaders began to see that “they would have to take a hand in shaping the laws that governed them,” which meant lobbying the state and federal governments “to seize the powers to regulate” the industrial economy on the “behalf” of working class interests.  Women and ethnic minorities also tried to use the political process in order to highlight their marginal status and seek redress through political rights, but these efforts were largely unsuccessful during the “Progressive Era,” with the exception of white women who were able to gain suffrage by the end of WWI.[xxxi]      

Painter also talked at length about race and racism in the U.S.  She discussed the racialized U.S. foreign policy and imperialist interventionist projects of the period.  Formally mapped out in 1885 at the Berlin Conference, the world had been divided by white Europeans, and also by the turn of the century Japan.  By 1900 Europeans ruled over 1/5 of the world’s land and 1/10 of the world’s human population.  Each dominant European nation assigned itself “national spheres of interest” over which each nation, through soft and hard exercises of colonial mastery, exploited favorable terms of trade and natural resource extraction.  The U.S. via a revitalized Monroe Doctrine asserted control over the Americas and the Caribbean with expansive moves across the Pacific and into China.  With some envy for the preeminent stature of Great Britain, Painter argued that an “Anglo-American identity of interest” coupled with an “Anglo-Saxon chauvinism” congealed in the later 19th century as the English-speaking countries united under the racialized banner of “the natural superiority of Anglo-Saxons.”  After the conquest of the Philippines president McKinley wrapped U.S. foreign policy in this doctrine of “the white man’s burden.”  He stated that the Filipinos could not be left to themselves because “they were unfit for self-government” and, thus, the Americans had a duty “to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them.”  Indiana Senator Albert J. Beveridge believed that the “American Republic” was destined, through the will of God and the dictates of the “highest law” of “race,” to be “the most masterful race in history.”  Painter explained: “Imperialism was elemental, racial, predestined, for God had prepared the English-speaking people, master organizers, for governing what Beveridge called ‘save and senile people.’”  Even anti-imperialists, who argued against the trappings of empire for many reasons, often framed their critiques of foreign intervention with the same racist assumptions, and focused more on the implications of empire for poor whites in America.  Many Southerners actually felt vindicated by Imperial policies, although skeptical about ruling over more non-white people.  Benjamin Tillman argued to his fellows in Congress that “We of the South” had already “borne this white man’s burden of a colored race in our midst.”  In 1883 the Supreme Court had already invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and by the 1890s there was widespread acceptance of Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement laws.  The color line became an increasingly important national preoccupation by the early 20th century as the U.S. became defined more and more as a white man’s nation.  Thus self-proclaimed “progressives” never touched the white supremacy of the South and de facto “racial hierarchy” of the country as a whole.[xxxii]

Another article by John D. Buenker published in 1988 argued for the existence of “two full-blown political cultures,” which influenced and defined the socio-political and cultural identifications of Americans during the turn of the 20th century.[xxxiii]  Despite the “complexity and diversity of motives, goals, methods, and results” of socio-political and cultural struggle during this period, Buenker argued for two distinctive and primary “competing political cultures.”  These two political cultures were especially important in defining the relationship between the individual and society, and they set up distinctive battle lines within the “arena of structural reform:” 1) the “new politics” of a “modernizing” ideology of “atomistic aggregation of sovereign individuals,” which was associated with the “reformer-individualist-Anglo-Saxon complex,” and 2) the “old politics” of an “ethnic identification” of “organic networks,” which was aligned with the “boss-immigrant-machine complex.”  Buenker argued that these two world views shaped the context out of which individuals defined their socio-political-cultural identities and allegiances, but they should not be seen as some oversimplified dualism: “The choice made by individuals was not a dichotomous one between the sovereign individualist or organic network world views.  Rather, the two views functioned as antipodes on a continuum or as the rows and columns of a matrix on which each person found his or her own identity out of a bewildering variety of permutations that changed over the life cycle.”  The Progressive coalition would have been associated with the “new politics” and part of their mission, under the terms Buenker introduced in this essay, was to confront and defeat the “old politics” for control over the socio-political-cultural reform that would govern the new century.        

In 1999 Alan Dawley published a major work on the broad period of reform infusing the early 20th century: Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State.  The central question of his book (and the broad period of reform under study) was not about Progressivism but about “how could the existing form of the state, designed generations earlier for an agrarian-commercial society, withstand the brawling conflicts and relentless evolution of an urban-industrial way of life?”  Dawley argued that the “crux of American history” around the turn of the 20th century was the “reckoning between a dynamic society and the existing liberal state.”  Progressivism was only a small, but important part of this much larger and very global issue. 

His book broke down the reckoning of state and society into three stages.  The first stage was “imbalance” and he located this stage between the 1890s and 1913.  During this period U.S. society was “on a collision course” with its political system based on laissez-faire liberalism and the inequality it bred.  Liberty and political right were “reserved” for wealthy, white men and as other groups struggled for socio-political inclusion, the “polarities of class and culture intensified” and “struggles broke out” across the nation.  Many reform initiatives reacted to this conflict so as to resolve it, but different reformers often fostered conflicting visions, which only furthered the melee.  And behind it all, Dawley argued, was a “contradiction between the needs of society and the existing political system.”  The next stage, from 1914 to 1924, was a time of “confronting issues” by the state resulting in an increase in state intervention and regulation, whereby, the “governing system” of “state embedded in society” began to change in dialectical relation to social struggles.  The last stage from 1925 to 1938 marked a “resolution” of state intervention to “restore balance” to the governing system.  The New Deal was the primary institutional impetus of this resolution, but Dawley was quite clear in arguing that this new policy program focused on “neither liberty nor equality, but security.”

At the center of Dawley’s book was the “problem of hegemony:” “how was society held together (consensus) against its own inner contradictions (conflict)?”  One of the central arguments he made towards explaining the successful change within the governing system was the power and strategy of elites “to regain their legitimacy by reforming the system.”  He links progressivism to “managerial liberalism” and “social liberalism” as viable forms of state interventionism that could accommodate reformist demands for social change while legitimizing elite management of the social and political transformations.  As a solidly liberal and yet quasi-socialist ideology, Progressivism was able to “contain” socialism and thus middle-class and elite interests were able to steer reformist initiatives in more conservative and capitalist directions that did not significantly challenge the institutional structure of liberal society.  Dawley argued that it was “inevitable” that “state structures and ruling values would change” – “the only questions were how, and in whose interests?”  In terms of early 20th century reform initiatives and state interventionism, Dawley wrote, “Americans were dragged kicking and screaming toward social responsibility.”[xxxiv]  Thus Progressivism, in Dawley’s conception, was a response to challenge the excesses and instability of the elite managed liberal state while containing the more threatening challenges and disorder of lower class unrest.        

John Whiteclay Chambers II first published The Tyranny of Change: American in the Progressive Era, 1890 – 1920 in 1992.  He noted that many historians have written about the “Progressive Era,” but they have not been clear about “the nature of either progressivism or the era.”[xxxv]  Despite this confusion, he argued the concepts of a “progressive impulse or ethos” and a “Progressive Era” continued to be “relevant.”  He noted that while Progressivism was not a united movement, it was still “the most pervasive political reform effort since the pre-Civil War period.”  He called Progressivism a “controversial and complex,” “multifaceted,” “moderate” reform movement that “affected nearly every aspect of American life.”  He also acknowledged the shifting coalitions theory by stating how a “hodgepodge of coalitions” often “contradicted each other” while working for “diverse” social change.  However, while he denied Progressives a “common creed or a system of values,” he also described what he believed to be some common “clusters of ideas” and “social languages,” like democratic ideals, rhetorical appeals to move people, a “politics of opposition.”  Whiteclay argued that Progressives were not often original thinkers, but there were powerful “users” of ideas in the effort to initiate social change. 

Chambers devoted a whole chapter to the “Progressive Impulse” in which he defined “Progressivism” as a “nationwide movement” composed of a “number of major efforts to reform society through the power of private groups and public agencies.”  Leaders and participants of some of these reform efforts called themselves “Progressives,” and hence the label often given for the whole period, but there were many radical and conservative reformers as well.  Chambers noted, Progressives “battled conservatives, radicals, other reformers, and often each other.”  Acknowledging the multiplicity of ideological reform groups was a marked change in direction as most historians up to this point had tended to focus mostly on those particular individuals and groups who claimed the “Progressive” mantle.   

Chambers noted that recent scholarship in the 1990s had emphasized the socio-political contexts of reform (“the environment of politics, power, ideas, and values”), and also the role of the state, specifically the relationships between different “political structures” and particular social groups.  Perhaps the most notable new direction in the historiography of the period had been Chambers’ use of the term “the new interventionists” to describe the whole, broad reform movement of the period, which included Progressives, but also included the many other ideological reform groups of the period   The new interventionists used voluntary associations and sometimes the state to challenge 19th century lassie faire individualism and free-market capitalism and this challenge took many forms: Progressives, moderates, conservatives, traditionalists, and radical activists like socialists, communists, and anarchists.  The new interventionists, Chambers claimed, left a “divided legacy.”  They seemed to have been more successful “at arousing indignation and protest than at maintaining effective government and substantially ameliorating urban problems.”  They also over-relied on strong leadership and monolithic reform visions that often led to “the tyranny of change,” whereby, the general public supported or elected strong leaders but had very little impact on public planning or policy.[xxxvi]

William Deverell argued that by 1994 the concepts of “progressivism” and “progressive” carried “diverse and heavy burdens of meaning,” which made many scholars believe that these terms had “outlived their usefulness as meaningful expressions by which to explain” the past: these concepts had lost, in the words of Martin Sklar, their “interpretive precision.”[xxxvii]  But Deverell argued that scholars must not loose sight of the fact that “individuals, parties, and groups used the terms progressive and progressivism to define themselves, their work, and their outlook as the new century arrived.”  He stressed that there was an “historical context” within which these terms were “borrowed, taken, utilized, even invented” and scholars and historians would do well to admit that these terms “once meant something” before these terms become jettisoned for more precise conceptualizations.  Deverell noted that while progressivism had become “an embattled word, an embattled concept,” real derivatives from the “progressive phenomenon” were still visible in the current socio-political climate and discourse: “Progressivism is alive and well four score years after its birth.”

Gary Gerstle’s “The Protean Character of American Liberalism” (1994) discussed the changing ethos of American liberalism from the turn of the twentieth century to the New Deal.[xxxviii]  Gerstle argued, it is “unwise to treat the liberal community as a stable political entity or to presume that the criteria for identifying liberals in one period can be applied to another.  Any effort to define the liberal community must be firmly located in time and space.”  Gerstle noted that the “liberal tradition” had three “foundational principles” (emancipation, rationality, and progress), but overall liberalism had a marked “malleability” that made for variant socio-political programs and ideologies. 

Classical liberalism revolved around free markets, limited statism, and bourgeois morality, which often defended corporate capitalism, segregation and disenfranchisement.  By the end of the 19th century liberalism displayed a reformist edge and it organized “rational interventions in society and culture,” often by turning “to the state as an institutional medium capable of reconstructing society and of educating citizens.”  Progressivism was a three pronged liberal reaction to (a) socialism and labor radicalism, (b) the “extraordinary concentration of power and wealth,” and (c) a diverse influx of immigrating ethnic groups.  Progressives wanted to find ways to promote and protect “freedom of trade and individual liberty” by way of state regulation and welfare, and by way of “guild socialism.”  They also wanted to engage in “cultural reconstruction” because liberals believed in the importance of individual moral character as the foundation of civic virtue.  When dealing with foreigners this “reconstruction” took the form of “Americanization” in order to “culturally and morally transform…aliens into citizens.”  But Progressives were a diverse bunch (“left-leaning Progressives” ranging from socialists to left leaning pluralists, and “rightward-leaning Progressives” from Americanizers to hard core nationalists preaching “100 percent Americanism”) and because of these conflicts of purposes and methods they “had difficulty fashioning a cultural politics to which they could all adhere,” which eventually lead to a loss of “coherence as a political movement.”

During World War I and the Red Scare Progressives felt themselves and their ideological convictions to be “impotent in the face of a reactionary nationalism.”  Liberals largely “give up the fight to create a new culture and new nationalism,” and began to ignore the “irrational” realm of culture to focus instead on the more rational and therefore changeable realm of economics and political economy.  This lead to a widespread “exclusion of ethnicity and race” from liberal social scientific analysis, which lead to a “more narrowly conceived” liberal program of economic recovery during the New Deal years.  It took the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party to bring back liberal discussions of “racial and ethnic discrimination.”  After World War II liberals once again “reconstituted” their political focus and began to define “issues of ethnicity and race as appropriate targets of rational social action,” while treating “class politics as an expression of irrationality” and therefore beyond the scope of liberal intervention.       

In 1997 Eric Foner edited a volume for the American Historical Association that offered a look at the “new” American history written over the last 20 years.  Within this volume Richard L. McCormick talked about Progressivism and other reform impulses in “Public Life in Industrial America, 1877 – 1917.”[xxxix]  In this essay McCormick claimed that the central issue of this period was industrialization and modernization, and how individuals and groups addressed the unsettling consequences of these two developments.  There is no “coherent synthesis,” McCormick argued, for describing the “complex” social, political and cultural reactions to industrialization and modernization.  There were “many organized endeavors” that produced many “unexpected results.” But McCormick did argue for some common themes:

“Most people confronted variations on a common problem: the defense of their families and communities against outside forces emanating from industrial growth and the increasing heterogeneity of the population.  Americans faced that problem, moreover, within a common environment: a rapidly expanding economy that was causing massive dislocations, frequent depressions, and widespread unemployment.”

In response to this common problem and a common environment, “virtually every segment of society plunged into public life to advance (or defend) their private values.”  But many different segments of society acted in many different ways for many different reasons.[xl]  McCormick focused on some of the major segments of society that have been covered in the recent literature: business and financial interests, industrial workers, farmers, and middle-class women.  He described how they variously responded to the common problem of the era: looking to the government to promote economic growth; organizing and looking to the government to foster unionization and industrial reform; organizing political blocks and cooperative ventures; joining associations and lobbying for reform.  McCormick argued that the most notable phenomenon of the era was the organization of socio-political-cultural associations that addressed a wide range of social problems from a wide range of perspectives, and “increasingly offered not panaceas but full-blown agendas for social and political change.”  In a certain sense these radical, Populist, and Progressive groups failed to achieve much, as decades of historians have shown, but not because they were necessarily naive or ineffective, but because “their enemies were more powerful” and because voting and policy change were seen as the only legitimate form of success.  However, McCormick makes clear that reformers of this period were successful in a much larger sense; they were able to create hundreds of organized, “non partisan” associations, which were able to drain “money, manpower, and organizational muscle” from political parties, and in turn “reshaped” the governing system throughout the century along “activist” and “interventionist lines.” 

The “seeds of Progressivism were planted,” McCormick argued, in response to two looming questions: whether social and political institutions were “adequate” enough to address and fix devastating times, and whether “democracy and economic equality were possible in an industrial society?”  The Progressives[xli] were not alone “in trying to use public, political means to solves problems,” but they might have been the most effective and successful group to do so.  The Progressive project consisted of four “distinctive methods:” organizing voluntary associations, investigating pertinent problem, finding the facts, and using social scientific analysis to offer a solution.  Progressives seemed to believe that experts using the scientific method could find the perfect solutions to all social problems and, further, they believed the solutions would benefit everyone as well as society as a whole.  But in reality, Progressives used the rhetoric of science and the common good to mask the imposition of their own values, especially in relation to the “racial and ethnic groups they hated and feared,” in their broad efforts to “improve and control the often frightening conditions of industrial life.”  

Another study of Progressivism was done in 2000 by a political scientist who was engaged on a longitudinal study of a much broader topic.  Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community focused on the change of social capital and civic engagement in the United States over the course of the 20th century.  In the last section of his book, as a way to set up and inform his policy prescriptions, Putnam devoted a chapter to “Lessons of History: The Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.”  This chapter was indebted to many of the books reviewed in this paper.  In this chapter Putnam praised the “Progressive Era” (which he located from 1900 – 1915) as a good example of “practical civic enthusiasm,” but he also said that it was suffused with “exclusion” based on class, ethnicity, and race.  Progressives were a “practical” and “experimental” bunch of reformers who shifted programmatically between professionalism and grassroots democracy in their conviction that social, political and economic institutions needed to be better adapted to the modern industrial world – although Putman made it clear that Progressives seemed to prefer “technocratic elitism” and “expert solutions.”  The main engine of reform was the voluntary association (social, political, religious, and cultural), which was the main focus of Putnam’s study.  Putnam argued that the period from 1870 to 1920 displayed a “civic inventiveness” in terms of the founding, range, and durability of associational organizations, which was and still is un-paralleled in U.S. history: “to a remarkable extent American civil society at the close of the twentieth century still rested on organizational foundations laid at the beginning of the century.”  Putnam called Progressivism a “broad and variegated” “social movement” that may not have been much of a social movement in the conventional sense; however, it represented a “civic communitarian reaction to the ideological individualism of the Gilded Age” and the primary form this reaction took was the creation of voluntary associations and socio-political institutions, which greatly increased the aggregate measure of social capital and civic engagement.  It was this creation of social capital and civic engagement that marks the Progressive movement as a seminal event in the history of the U.S. and it had an impact many decades after the Progressives as a “movement” faded from the stage.  But Putnam ended his chapter with a warning: “social capital is inevitably easier to foster within a homogeneous community.”  The Progressives’ broad expansion of social capital was fostered by systematic socio-political exclusion based on class, ethnicity and race.  Putnam praises the Progressive Era for its inventiveness, enthusiasm, and idealism, but warns that its particular reforms “are no longer appropriate for our time” – “Our challenge now is to reinvent the twenty-first-century equivalent.”[xlii]

The last and most recent study to be examined is Michael McGerr’s A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870 – 1920.[xliii]  This impressively comprehensive book looked at Progressivism in relation to a broad swath of social, political, and cultural responses to industrialization and modernity.  Industrialization “fractured old ideologies,” wrote McGerr, and “created new ones, including progressivism.”[xliv]  Progressives articulated, in the words of one of their figure heads Theodore Roosevelt, a “fierce discontent,” and they believed both in social progress and in the moral regeneration of their nation.  Progressivism was the “creed of a crusading middle class” that offered the “promise of utopianism” in the wake of industrial inefficiency, urban chaos, political degeneracy, and cultural confusion.  Progressivism, McGerr claimed, was a “radical movement” – what he called “the radical center” – that sought not only to “use the state to regulate the economy,” but also to “transform” “other social classes,” other Americans, into a new socio-cultural body politic. It was this demand for “social transformation,” McGerr claimed, that “remains at once profoundly impressive and profoundly disturbing a century later.”[xlv]

McGerr also acknowledged that Progressivism contained many “ambiguities and contradictions,” but its various “fault lines” never “split wide open,” partly due to the fact that the Progressive middle class was “overwhelmingly white and Protestant” and, for the most part (despite the fissures of class and gender) culturally homogeneous.  This raises a central question about which the literature on Progressivism and early 20th century reform has been largely silent until the 1970s, but which many historians since then, including McGerr, have exposed in detail.

There is a distinct and disturbing relationship between what Nancy MacLean has termed “reactionary populism” and what we have labeled “Progressivism.”  MacLean’s book on the Ku Klux Klan described her subject not as the backwoods yokels they are often mistaken for, but as an organized movement composed of white, evangelical Protestant, mostly petit-bourgeois (but included working class laborers and middle class professionals) who felt threatened by the developments of modernity, and who thereby fomented a reactionary form of populism.  The rise of divorce, feminism, black radicalism, white racial liberalism, labor unionization and strikes, monopoly capitalism, and increased immigration are just some of the major issues initiating their conservative reaction.[xlvi]  MacLean’s Klan members were going through their own status revolution, whereby, the typical Klansmen was economically better off the most blacks and many whites and often upwardly mobile, but still felt “vulnerable,” “unstable” and insecure.[xlvii] 

Klansmen were conservative, populist, Jacksonian democrats with an explicitly racialized and Protestant conception of White Anglo-Saxon citizenship consecrating white supremacy.  They reacted to modernity and industrialization (to the extent that industrialization touched the South) in systematically similar ways to the Progressive programs: both groups formed organized associations; they rhetorically denounced “threats” to their idealized social order; they formulated an ideology to defend an embattled cultural identity; they took action to “reform” or remedy what they considered to be negative socio-political and cultural developments; and they used coercion when rhetorical appeals were not effective.  The two main differences between Progressives and reactionary populists were that the Klansmen had an intense distrust of centralized government and statist regulatory authority, and they had a willingness to use violent force[xlviii] as a standard socio-political tactic.

Another similarity between Progressives and Klansmen was a hierarchical, Social Darwinist belief in the racial and cultural superiority of “white” “civilization,” which was often equated with Americanism.[xlix]  C. Vann Woodward pointed out in 1954 that many Americans, including Progressive reformers (living in all areas of the nation, the North, West and South) shared many of the Klansmen’s beliefs about a “White” America: “a republic is possible only to men of homogenous race;” the United States of America was “a white man’s nation” based on a “white man’s religion:” “to stand as impregnable as a tower against every encroachment upon the white man’s liberty, the white man’s institutions, the white man’s ideals, in the white man’s country, under the white man’s flag.”[l]  It is no accident of historical fortune that the “Progressive Era” was also the “great age of segregation” in the United States.[li]  The Progressives for the most part harbored deep suspicions and prejudices against many groups and social classes that seemed alien to their WASP middle class way of life.  Progressive reformers set up hierarchically ordered binary oppositions of identity based on class, race, gender, religion and age.  The “fundamental paradox of progressive politics,” wrote McGerr, was that Progressives spoke the language of democracy, but in thought and deed they were “not very democratic at all:” the “progressives’ condescension toward other groups” created “a narrow definition of ‘the people,’” dictated antiparticipatory reforms,” “supported disfranchisement,” and projected a version of Americanism that was “for whites only.”[lii]  David R. Roediger argued, “The Progressive project of imperialist expansion and the Progressive nonproject of Jim Crow segregation ensured that race thinking would retain and increase its potency.”[liii]  Eric Foner pointed out that Progressives “bore the marks of their nineteenth-century origins” and thus “the idea of ‘race’ as a permanent, defining characteristic of individuals and social groups retained a powerful hold on their thinking.  Consciously or not, it circumscribed the ‘imagined community’ of Progressive America.”[liv] 

So then what is “Progressivism” and what is the Progressive legacy?  These terms are embedded in an “age of social politics.”[lv]  There were many reformist groups of various political and ideological stripes at the turn of the 20th century, of which Progressivism was but one potent example.[lvi]  There were not only many reformist groups that articulated many different reform initiatives, but Progressives also took “man paths” towards reform.[lvii]  As a culturally homogeneous and economically secure social class (although uneasy in their security), Progressive reformers had the ability, education, and socio-economic resources to create many diverse voluntary organizations, which they used to further various social, economic, political, and cultural causes.  Progressives were animated on the whole by a Republican-Populist-Protestant infused ideological orientation that often blended capitalist, scientific, and professional methods, all under a politicized and racialized banner of WASP “Americanism.” 

Progressives sought many types of social change and aligned themselves with various other ideological groups to achieve reform coalitions on specific issues and initiatives, but they were primarily concerned with devising a clear and efficient order to harness modernity and industrialization under the tri-partite control of 1) a regulatory State integrated with 2) WASP civic associations and business corporations, and directed by 3) a technocratic elite.   “Americanization,” to introduce this broad and complicated term which is the central focus of this larger study, could be described as the essential yet myriad conceptualization for this controlling order: “America” as a nationalistic and cultural identity would be the new order the Progressives sought and they were very confident, as Gary Gerstle pointed out, “that their use of government and science would turn immigrants into Americans.”[lviii] 

As Robert Wiebe argued in “Framing U.S. History: Democracy, Nationalism, and Socialism,” the challenge of white Americans during the 18th and 19th century was not to reform so much as to “create a social order” and that social order, my larger study will argue, was a program of Americanization, which included the formation of a federated bureaucracy centered within the corporate-capitalist State.  By the early 20th century, this State would come to infuse, unite, and control the parameters of foreign and domestic policy under a neo-liberal rhetoric of welfare capitalism, consumer affluence, and technocratic professionalism.[lix]  However, the large-scale initiative of Americanization would not be uncontested nor would it be rhetorically or programmatically uniform.  As a consensus identity emerged and was inculcated within the public school system, the margins of American society were infused by minority populations who struggled for their own human dignity and opportunity within the American system.  The Progressive century of Americanization would be the ideological center of heated debate.  Preconceived notions of homogeneous and class based democratic citizenship would be challenged as many minority populations asked, “Who gets to be an American?” – and further, as a socio-cultural-political ideal, “What ought America to be?”     

Cultural War: Epistemological Authority, Progressive Politics, and the Americanization Movement

The diverse and often contradictory Progressive reform movement has come to characterize an era of “social politics” in U.S. history.[lx]  At the turn of the 20th century there were many reformist groups with various political and ideological programs (Populists, Progressives, Socialists, anarchists, labor unions, reactionary populists, nativists, and more).  Progressivism was the most influential reform ideology of the 20th century because it offered a conservative liberal-capitalist framework for tempering the more radical demands of socialists and labor activists.[lxi]  Not only were there many reformist groups with many different initiatives, but the highly diverse group called the Progressives also took “man paths” of reform.[lxii]  As a relatively culturally homogeneous and economically secure, yet uneasy, social class, what would be later termed the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) middle-class, Progressive reformers had the ability, education, and socio-economic resources to create many diverse voluntary organizations, which they used to further various social, economic, political, and cultural causes.  Progressives were animated on the whole by a Republican-Populist-Protestant infused ideological orientation that often blended capitalist, scientific, and professional methods, all under a politicized and racialized banner of WASP “Americanism.” 

Progressives sought many types of social change and aligned themselves with various other ideological groups to achieve reform coalitions on specific issues and initiatives, but they were primarily concerned with devising a clear and efficient order to harness modernity and industrialization under the tri-partite control of 1) a regulatory State integrated with 2) WASP civic associations and business corporations, and directed by 3) a technocratic elite.   The idea of “Americanization” could be described as the fundamental yet myriad conceptualization for this controlling order: “America” as a distinct people with a uniform culture and a clear sense of national identity would be the new order the Progressives sought and they were very confident, as Gary Gerstle pointed out, “that their use of government and science would turn immigrants into Americans” and, thereby, mold newcomers into the new constructed Progressive American nation.[lxiii] 

But there is also a disturbing relationship between Progressive reformers and “reactionary populism” that should be addressed.  Reactionary populists like Ku Klux Klan members were not the stereotypical backwoods yokel.  The Klan was as an organized movement composed of white, evangelical Protestant, mostly petit-bourgeois (but included working class laborers and middle class professionals) who felt threatened by the developments of modernity.  The rise of divorce, feminism, black radicalism, white racial liberalism, labor unionization and strikes, monopoly capitalism, and increased immigration are just some of the major issues initiating their conservative reaction.[lxiv]  Klan members were going through what Richard Hofstadter once called (in a different context) a “status revolution.”  Klansmen were economically better off then most blacks and many whites and often upwardly mobile, but they still felt “vulnerable,” “unstable” and insecure in their relatively privileged social position.[lxv] 

Klansmen were conservative, populist, Jacksonian democrats with an explicitly racialized and Protestant conception of White Anglo-Saxon citizenship consecrating white supremacy.  They reacted to modernity and industrialization (to the extent that industrialization touched the South) in systematically similar ways to the Progressive programs: both groups formed organized associations; they rhetorically denounced “threats” to their idealized social order; they formulated an ideology to defend an embattled cultural identity; they took action to “reform” or remedy what they considered to be negative socio-political and cultural developments; and they used coercion when rhetorical appeals were not effective.  The two main differences between Progressives and reactionary populists were that the Klansmen had an intense distrust of centralized government and statist regulatory authority, and they had a willingness to use violent force[lxvi] as a standard socio-political tactic.

Another similarity between Progressives and Klansmen was a hierarchical, Social Darwinist belief in the racial and cultural superiority of “white” “civilization,” which was often equated with Americanism.[lxvii]  C. Vann Woodward pointed out in 1954 that many Americans, including Progressive reformers (living in all areas of the nation, the North, West and South) shared many of the Klansmen’s beliefs about a “White” America: “a republic is possible only to men of homogenous race;” the United States of America was “a white man’s nation” based on a “white man’s religion:” “to stand as impregnable as a tower against every encroachment upon the white man’s liberty, the white man’s institutions, the white man’s ideals, in the white man’s country, under the white man’s flag.”[lxviii]  It is no accident of historical fortune that the “Progressive Era” was also the “great age of segregation” in the United States.[lxix]  The Progressives for the most part harbored deep suspicions and prejudices against many groups and social classes that seemed alien to their WASP middle class way of life.  Progressive reformers set up hierarchically ordered binary oppositions of identity based on class, race, gender, religion and age.  The “fundamental paradox of progressive politics,” wrote McGerr, was that Progressives spoke the language of democracy, but in thought and deed they were “not very democratic at all:” the “progressives’ condescension toward other groups” created “a narrow definition of ‘the people,’” dictated antiparticipatory reforms,” “supported disfranchisement,” and projected a version of Americanism that was “for whites only.”[lxx]  David R. Roediger argued, “The Progressive project of imperialist expansion and the Progressive nonproject of Jim Crow segregation ensured that race thinking would retain and increase its potency.”[lxxi]  Eric Foner pointed out that Progressives “bore the marks of their nineteenth-century origins” and thus “the idea of ‘race’ as a permanent, defining characteristic of individuals and social groups retained a powerful hold on their thinking.  Consciously or not, it circumscribed the ‘imagined community’ of Progressive America.”[lxxii] 

As Robert Wiebe argued, the challenge of white Americans during the late 18th and 19th century was not to reform so much as to “create a social order” and that social order was a program of Americanization, which included the expansion of a corporate-capitalist State, the dissemination of a WASP nationalism (Americanism), and the trained loyalty of the American public through the public schools and an coordinated civic society.  By the early 20th century, this State would come to infuse, unite, and control the parameters of foreign and domestic policy under a neo-liberal rhetoric of welfare capitalism, consumer affluence, and technocratic professionalism.[lxxiii]  However, the large-scale initiative of Americanization would not be uncontested nor would it be rhetorically or programmatically uniform.  As a consensus identity emerged and was inculcated within the public school system, the margins of American society were infused by minority populations who struggled for their own human dignity and opportunity within the American system.  The Progressive project of Americanization would be the ideological center of heated debate over American nationalism, citizenship, and the common good.  The notion of cultural homogeneous, racialized, and class-based democratic citizenship would be challenged as many minority populations.  The early 20th century debate focused on, “Who gets to be an American?” and “What ought America to be?”     

Many white Americans supported a white supremacist view of American nationalism.  After the conquest of the Philippines president McKinley wrapped U.S. foreign policy in this doctrine of “the white man’s burden.”  He stated that the Filipinos could not be left to themselves because “they were unfit for self-government” and, thus, the Americans had a duty “to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them.”  Indiana Senator Albert J. Beveridge believed that the “American Republic” was destined, through the will of God and the dictates of the “highest law” of “race,” to be “the most masterful race in history.”  Nell Irvin Painter explained: “Imperialism was elemental, racial, predestined, for God had prepared the English-speaking people, master organizers, for governing what Beveridge called ‘save and senile people.’”  Even anti-imperialists, who argued against the trappings of empire for many reasons, often framed their critiques of foreign intervention with the same racist assumptions, and focused more on the implications of empire for poor whites in America.  Many Southerners actually felt vindicated by Imperial policies, although skeptical about ruling over more non-white people.  Benjamin Tillman argued to his fellows in Congress that “We of the South” had already “borne this white man’s burden of a colored race in our midst.”  In 1883 the Supreme Court had already invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and by the 1890s there was widespread acceptance of Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement laws.  The color line became an increasingly important national preoccupation by the early 20th century as the U.S. became defined more and more as a white man’s nation.  Thus self-proclaimed “progressives” never touched the white supremacy of the South and de facto “racial hierarchy” of the country as a whole.[lxxiv]

The conservative Progressive Teddy Roosevelt saw the United States as standing on the threshold of “Armageddon” with the evils of plutocratic industrial power on one side and the evils of the violent mob on the other.  Under the banners of the “New Nationalism” and the “New Freedom,” Roosevelt called for the regulation of society and the economy by an empowered and enlightened federal government which would act as a disinterested arbitrator between conflicting political factions, like labor and capital (of course more radical voices pointed out the impossibility of a disinterested federal government as federal policy was often in the hands of industrial capitalists and their appointed voices in the Congress).  Teddy Roosevelt succinctly summarized the ideals of these Progressive reformers: “the object of the government is the welfare of the people.  The material progress and prosperity of a nation are desirable chiefly so far as they lead to the moral and material welfare of all good citizens.”[lxxv]  But as Gary Gerstle has pointed out, Roosevelt’s nationalism was based on a racist platform: 1) “political and social equality for all, irrespective of race, ethnicity, or nationality, and a regulated economy that would place economic opportunity and security within the reach of everyone;” 2) the maximizing of “opportunity” for racially superior Americans while also limiting opportunity for racially inferior Americans and immigrants; 3) dealing out “harsh discipline” by means of “marginalization” and “punishment” and/or “Americanization” to “immigrants, political radicals, and others who were thought to imperil the nation’s welfare.”  Rooseveltian nationalism pivoted around a conception of “controlled hybridity” by which both “racial hybridity and purity” and “racial inclusion and exclusion” combined into a more expansive Americanism, but one still marked by racial prejudice, intolerance, and WASP superiority.  Roosevelt embraced many of the new European immigrants, both Catholic and Jewish, but he continued to exclude Afro-Americans and Asians from the “crucible” of America.  Roosevelt adopted Herbert Croly’s conception of “New Nationalism” and used it as a Progressive platform to extend full citizenship only to the new European immigrants on the condition that they left behind their old cultural affiliations to became “100% percent American.”[lxxvi]

Gerstle traces coercive Americanization programs to Theodore Roosevelt’s conception of racial nationalism.  Roosevelt’s conception of “controlled hybridity” allowed for the assimilation of certain ethnic minorities in American only if they completely Americanized by which he meant leaving behind European identity, tradition, and loyalty and taking up American identity, tradition, and loyalty: The immigrant “must not bring in his Old-World religious[,] race[,] and national antipathies, but must merge them into love for our common country, and must take pride in the things which we can all take pride in.  He must revere our flag; not only must is come first, but no other flag should ever come second.  He must learn to celebrate Washington’s birthday rather than that of the Queen or Kaiser, and the Fourth of July instead of St. Patrick’s Day…Above all, the immigrant must learn to talk and think and be United States.”  Roosevelt believed that the duty of the American public school should be to turn immigrants [“hyphenated Americans”] into “Americans pure and simple” because it was “an immense benefit to the European immigrant to change him into an American citizen.”  He also supported private voluntary associations in their work of Americanizing the immigrant both outside and inside the school.[lxxvii]

John Higham traced the origins of early 20th century Americanization efforts to the widespread xenophobia and nativism of the 1890s and earlier.  Early forms of nativism congealed into a rampant and rabid nationalist crusade of “America for Americans” and “100 per cent Americanism” during World War I.  Fear of the foreigner gave way to a more ambiguous fear of “disloyalty,” “the gravest sin in the morality of nationalism,” which was any thought that might question the “Absolute and Unqualified Loyalty to Our Country.”  This search for disloyalty focused uncomfortably on “hyphenated Americans” (German-Americans in particular) and their ability to support not only the war effort, but the greater cause of American nationalism.  Infusing the search for disloyalty was a “positive and prescriptive” rhetorical abstraction that did not rise “to the dignity of a systematic doctrine:” “100 per cent Americanism.”  While there was no specific dogmatic or programmatic ritual to prove one’s “Americanism,” there were several assumptions underlying this phrase.  One was a “belligerent” demand for “universal conformity” to the “spirit of nationalism” and total national loyalty” to the State, which was regulated through “the pressure of collective judgment.”  However, “passive assent to the national purpose was not enough; it must be grasped and carried forward with evangelical fervor” through the “inculcation of a spirit of duty:” “Patriotism therefore was interpreted as service.”  Theodore Roosevelt forcefully supported this sentiment: “We must sternly insist that all our people practice the patriotism of service…for patriotism means service to the Nation…We cannot render such service if our loyalty is in even the smallest degree divided.”  It was at this time in 1917 that “The American’s Creed” (“I pledge allegiance to the flag…”) was introduced as a classroom ritual in public schools to remind children of the object of their loyalty, but more so to rhetorically instill the virtue of “right-thinking, i.e. the enthusiastic cultivation of obedience and conformity.”[lxxviii] 

100 per cent Americanism, as Higham argued, was primarily a rhetorical affair of “propaganda” and “exhortation,” but with the onset of the war nationalists supported the expansion of state powers and “the punitive and coercive powers” of the state to support if not mandate loyalty and conformity.  There were many grass roots level initiatives to suppress German language newspapers, eliminate German from the public school curricula, boycott German opera, and rename German foods (sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage”).  There were even many “secret societies” of paralegal militias looking for spies and disloyal subjects.  One reported organization was the Anti-Yellow Dog League (supposedly with a thousand affiliated branches), which was made up of adolescent boys over 10 who searched for disloyal Americans.  Perhaps the most famous paralegal organization was the American Protective League, which boasted 250,000 members and 1,200 dispersed units.  The APL was the Justice Department’s “semiofficial” loyalty and conformity watchdog (they even had official badges) composed mostly of middle class professionals and subsidized by corporations.  The state and federal governments acted in turn, partly in response to the vitriolic sentiment of the American public.  Congress passed an act which repealed the charter of the German-American Alliance and many state governments banned the teaching of German.  The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was revitalized (this statute gave the President “arbitrary” authority over aliens in the U.S. in terms of arresting, restraining, and deporting individuals at will) and the Espionage Act in 1917 was passed (this statue penalized citizens for obstructing the war effort or aiding the enemy via “false statements”).

The Sedition Act was passed in 1918, which made any disloyal opinion illegal (whether against the nation, the flag, the government, or the Constitution) and punishable by twenty years in prison.  This Act was used extensively against radicals in the U.S. as “any radical critic of the way was customarily designated a ‘pro-German agitator.’”  As Higham noted, “the new creed of total loyalty outlawed so many kinds of dissent.”[lxxix]

As far as the immigrant population in America was concerned there seemed to be a “paradox of American nationalism,” which combined both “fraternity” and “hatred.”  The demands for unity and conformity turned coercive and aggressive mostly towards Germans and radicals, which thereby allowed many immigrant individuals and communities to at least outwardly conform to nationalist purpose and even join the military.  As Higham argued, “To a remarkable degree the psychic climate of war gave the average alien not only protection but also a sense of participation and belonging,” albeit within an atmosphere of “force of fear and compulsion.”  This charged atmosphere of 100 per cent Americanism survived and thrived after the war as self-proclaimed Americans still searched out disloyalty.  This placed immigrants in a precarious position.  The American Legion formed in 1919 in order “To foster and perpetuate a one-hundred-percent Americanism” and ferret out radical agitation.  Other “Loyal Legions” and vigilante groups (the second Ku Klux Klan re-emerged in 1915 and grew to several million followers in the 1920s) began to conflate dissolute, radical agitation, and the foreign-born as related problems.  The Big Red Scare of 1919 ignited a fever pitch of nationalist hysteria whereby anti-radical nativism began to indiscriminately target immigrant populations, which in turn began to effect industrial labor relations.  The Red Scare also pushed zealots like Attorney General Palmer to push for a general sedition law, which would allow for the prosecution of American citizens as well as the foreign born for dissenting opinion.  The New York legislature threw out five elected members solely because of their Socialist affiliation.  But when Palmer’s apocalyptic foretelling of revolution did not materialize on May Day 1920 the country began to realize that there was no widespread internal threat and by the mid-1920s the crest of 100 per cent Americanism began to flow into more peaceful expressions of national fervor.[lxxx]

Political liberals of the time did not often disagree with conservative nationalist ideology, except for the more rabid forms of white supremacy and xenophobia.  Some liberals did, however, disagree over tactics.  By the end of the 19th century liberalism displayed a reformist edge and it organized, as Gary Gerstle has documented, “rational interventions in society and culture,” often by turning “to the state as an institutional medium capable of reconstructing society and of educating citizens.” Classical liberalism revolved around free markets, limited statism, and bourgeois morality, which often defended corporate capitalism, segregation and disenfranchisement.  Progressivism was a three pronged liberal reaction to (a) socialism and labor radicalism, (b) the “extraordinary concentration of power and wealth,” and (c) a diverse influx of immigrating ethnic groups.  Progressives wanted to find ways to promote and protect “freedom of trade and individual liberty” by way of state regulation and welfare, and by way of “guild socialism.”  They also wanted to engage in “cultural reconstruction” because liberals believed in the importance of individual moral character as the foundation of civic virtue.  When dealing with foreigners this “reconstruction” took the form of “Americanization” in order to “culturally and morally transform…aliens into citizens.”  But Progressives were a diverse bunch (“left-leaning Progressives” ranging from socialists to left leaning pluralists, and “rightward-leaning Progressives” from Americanizers to hard core nationalists preaching “100 percent Americanism”) and because of these conflicts of purposes and methods they “had difficulty fashioning a cultural politics to which they could all adhere,” which eventually lead to a loss of “coherence as a political movement.”[lxxxi]  The Americanization movement, however, was an important liberal focus point for first decade of the 20th century.  Americanizers ranged from the more conservative and exclusivist “new nationalists” led by Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Croly, and Frances Kellor, to the more liberal and egalitarian “cosmopolitan pluralists” led by John Dewy, Randolph Bourne, and Jane Addams. 

An Americanization movement “emerged” from within the Progressive movement in order to offer “moderate civic nationalist alternatives” to the coercive racial ideology of white supremacists, exclusionists, and nativists that wanted immigration restrictions and limited freedom for immigrants.  Noah Pickus defined the Americanization movement in a positive light as “a wide range of legal, political, medical, civic, and cultural efforts to help immigrants adjust to their new surroundings and to encourage Americans to accept them.”  The Bureau of Naturalization in “An Outline Course in Citizenship” (1916) defined Americanization as the transformation of “uniformed foreigners, not comprehending our language, customs, or governmental institutions, to intelligent, loyal, and productive members of society.”  The Americanization movement was reacting against the sense of social fragmentation and conflict caused industrial, economic, social and institutional changes and it was made dramatically urgent by the massive influx of immigrants and by the strange newness of a “nationally oriented American society.”  Progressive reformers felt an urgent need to reorder society and give to all citizens a new “common identity” – a national identity as Americans.[lxxxii] 

The Americanization movement was concerned with “national unity,” but different factions approached this central issue differently.  Pickus broke the Americanization movement into two camps: “right-leaning Progressives” like Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Croly, and Frances Kellor, and “left-leaning Progressives” like John Dewey, Randolph Bourne, and Jane Addams.  Both wings offered liberal alternatives to immigrant restriction, but the left wing wanted a pluralist and cosmopolitan “international nation,” while the right wing believed in a narrower nationalism that welcomed immigrants only if they “relinquished cultural and political habits thought to be at odds with a robust American identity,” and the right wing was willing to use compulsion and force in order to create and preserve the bonds of national unity.[lxxxiii]

The Americanization movement has been known primarily because of the actions of the more powerful, “mainstream,” and influential right-leaning Progressives, and Pickus focused more on this group in his book.  Under the banner of “New Nationalism,” right-leaning Progressives sought to “eradicate” the ethnic identity of white European immigrants, while disavowing (through silence and segregation) any place for non-white Americans, in order to establish a “uniform national identity” and a fervent sense of patriotism based on WASP principles and culture.  Theodore Roosevelt proudly proclaimed in 1906, “We are making a new race” and he later added “The only man who is a good American is an American and nothing else…There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americans.”  Roosevelt admonished, “The immigrant must learn to talk and think and be United States.”  Nationally the Americanization movement was administrated by the newly formed (1905) Bureau of Naturalization (under the leadership of Commissioner Richard Campbell and his deputy Raymond Crist) and the Bureau of Education (under the leadership of commissioner Philander P. Claxton, Fred Butler, direct of the Americanization Division, and more importantly, Frances Kellor, director of the Division for Immigrant Education, a division completely supported financially by a non-governmental organization, the National Americanization Committee, also lead by Kellor).

Up till the early 1910s the primary method of Americanization had been teaching immigrants how to be “sufficiently American,” as Fred Butler asserted, “so that they will not be a danger to us.”  However, Noah Pickus has noted that Americanizers turned to more “aggressive” methods by the fall of 1915, symbolically demonstrated through the National Americanization Committee’s change of slogan from “Many People, But One Nation” to “America First.”  Frances Kellor and the NAC were very concerned about people not speaking “the same language,” not “follow[ing] the same flag,” and engaging in “anti-American” activities like “class consciousness and race hatred.”  Americanization efforts sought to not only make citizens of immigrants, but to make all Americans “loyal” with a “respect for authority” because the “security and prosperity” of the nation depended on it.  NAC organized and promoted social and industrial programs, military preparedness, coercive educational programs, and recruitment of ethnic leaders, especially members of the ethnic presses.  Frances Kellor had wanted to keep Americanization efforts from “alien baiting” and “repressive measures,” and she argued that Americanization should also accompany increased economic opportunities for immigrants, but Pickus argued that she was “pushed aside by forces that were committed to an ideologically pure Americans and had no interest in programs that directly aided newcomers.”  In 1919 the government banned NGO support of government agencies and, thus, NAC support for the Division for Immigrant Education came to an end, and Frances Kellor was removed as national coordinator for Americanization efforts. 

In 1918 the Bureau of Naturalization had begun to use naturalization fees to publish Americanization textbooks and distribute them as well as establishing the Division of Citizenship Training led by Deputy Commissioner Raymond Crist.  Crist believed that “nearly all can be transformed through attendance at the public schools into desirable citizenship material.”  He helped coordinate support for Americanization programs in public schools across the nation and by 1922 more than 750 U.S. cities and towns had some type of Americanization program, however, these programs suffered from high drop out rates, dry fact-based textbooks, and reliance on rote memorization and recitation.  In 1922 the secretary of labor, James J. Davis, wanted to set up a registration system to force aliens to register for a fee upon entrance to America, and he also wanted mandatory Americanization programs. 

Davis felt strongly that the U.S. had been “making citizenship entirely too cheap” and he wanted to protect Americans from “contact with the mental, moral and physical delinquents of all the world.”  He defended his insistence of coercion in the face of critics by arguing, “If we compel the alien to know America, I have no fear that there will come that change of heart necessary to produce an American citizen.”  The push for more coercive Americanization programs linked Americanization efforts to the simultaneous push by more nativist and reactionary elements for exclusionary immigration policies.  However, even these coercive efforts crumbled by the early 1920s as federal, state, and local politicians “proved unwilling to support Americanization programs if doing so required them to provide funding.”  But Americanization efforts did not die out, instead they expanded and folded into the very fabric of American life and public schooling.[lxxxiv] 

Noah Pickus has argued that left-leaning Progressives did not have a strong enough political “vision” to battle right-wing nationalism and, thus, their “vagueness and confusion” could not put forth a “clear, coherent, [or] compelling moderate alternative position.”  Thus Americanization devolved into a “zero-sum calculation” that forced immigrants to become “100% American.”  However, Pickus argued that Americanization was not a “coercive and exclusionary project from its inception.”  He argued that it was the “fear and insecurity of the war” that helped “legitimate otherwise objectionable policies,” and he further argued that part of the reason Americanization efforts collapsed was that “many of its proponents were simply not willing to pursue compulsory assimilatory measures to their logical extremes.”  Pickus claimed that the “achievements” of the Americanization movement were “remarkable,” and he listed four: legislation to protect immigrants, “large-scale practical assistance” to immigrants, outreach programs (including the development of adult education), and improvements to the naturalization system.[lxxxv]     

Institutionalizing Progressivism and Americanism: Education Reform and the ‘One Best System’

This essay follows close on the heels of our first foray into the historiographical debate over the conceptual terminology of social, cultural, and political “Progressivism.”  This essay will develop a comprehensive, yet selective portrait of so-called “Progressive” education so as to outline the major ideological and curricular developments that this term (both theory and practice) designates.  We will also trace the borders of historiographical debate over the conceptual delineation of Progressive education and, thereby, evaluate its usefulness as a concept for understanding U.S. educational reform programs during the first decades of the 20th century.      

 

The Progressive Education Movement: A Short History

The ideological and curricular roots of Progressive education go back centuries, rooted especially in French and German Romanticism.  Early philosophical and educational influences include Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Jean Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1834), and Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852).  The term Progressive applied to education in the English language seems to have come from Necker de Saussure’s book L’Education Progressive, ou Etude du Course de la Vie (Paris, 1836), which was translated into English in London as Progressive Education; or, Considerations on the Course of Life (1839). 

American Progressive education is often linked with the earlier nationalist and millennial “propaganda” of the common school reformer Horace Mann, whose mid-19th century common-school movement equated “education” with “national progress.”  Mann combined “Jeffersonian republicanism,” “Christian moralism,” and “Emersonian idealism” within his “total faith” in “the power of education.”  Mann believed universal education would be the “great equalizer” of democratic citizens.  He also saw education as a moderating force that would “balance the wheel” of society while also creating “wealth undreamed of.”  Mann was deeply disturbed by the conflict he saw around him (social, political, economic, and cultural).  He wanted a shared national value system that would insure a sense of community and a common political identity.  He saw a public, “common” school as the perfect instrument for this mission.  But in order to realize this vision of a public school system, Mann had to form “political coalitions” that often united “disparate interests” in a very “political” program of consensus building.[lxxxvi]

What Horace Mann began, men like William Torrey Harris saw to fruition.  When Harris started his work as a school reformer the idea of “universal education” was still very “radical” to most Americans.  When Harris had finished his career, universal education “had been made the nub of an essentially conservative ideology.”  Harris argued for a broader definition of education as a process of socialization that would inculcate children into the local and emerging “national” culture and prepare them for adulthood as democratic citizens.  His four basic principles of education were: 1) schooling should prepare children to become lifelong learners as adults; 2) the school should teach only what the child would not be taught by family, friends, and associates; 3) the school should teach only such subject matters as would have “a general theoretical bearing on the world in which the pupil lives;” and 4) the school should teach “moral education,” but never “religious education.”[lxxxvii] 

The early formation of American Progressive education as a “movement,” according to self proclaimed Progressives John Dewey and Robert Holmes Beck, started in Quincy, Massachusetts.  It was here that Colonel Francis W. Parker became the superintendent of schools in 1873 and he initiated the “Quincy System” soon thereafter.  This new system of education became a quintessential model for what later reformers would label “Progressive.”  In 1892 the journalist Joseph Mayer Rice ran a series on U.S. public schools for the Forum, which was published as a book in 1893, The Public School System of the United States.  While he did not explicitly mentioning a Progressive educational movement, he did use the term Progressive many times in relation to notable school reforms and initiatives, especially the “Quincy System” of Colonel Parker.  Also in 1892, several attendees (including John Dewey) of the National Education Association meeting in Saratoga Springs, New York formed the National Herbart Society to promote the educational philosophy of the famous German pedagogue.  A year later G. Stanley Hall published his first major research project on child study, “The Contents of Children’s Minds” (1893).  This research subject would eventually feed into a larger child study movement that would become the major plank of the Progressive education platform: child-centered curriculum and instruction.[lxxxviii] 

A Progressive educational “movement” was said to have stirred in earnest by the time John Dewey began his “Laboratory School” in Chicago in 1896 and gave his lectures on The School and Society in 1899.  The movement supposedly congealed between the founding of the Association for the Advancement of Progressive Education (or the Progressive Education Association, PEA) in 1919 and its publication of Progressive Education starting in 1924.  The high-water mark for Progressive education in terms of organizational development and theoretical vitality was during the 1930s.  An impassioned organ of radical Progressive educational theory and practice, The Social Frontier, appeared in print in 1934 as an outlet for Social Reconstructionist thought.  Due to financial insolvency, it was later tempered and incorporated into the PEA as Frontiers of Democracy, which ran from 1939 to 1944.  In 1936 many influential Progressive educators and intellectuals formed the John Dewey Society as a moderate forum to discuss Progressive and liberal philosophy.  The John Dewey Society also started to publish important educational research yearbooks by 1937. 

1938 might have marked the apex of Progressivism in the U.S.  In this year the Progressive Education Association’s enrollment peaked at 10,440 members; Time magazine featured the PEA as a cover story and announced its wide influence; and John Dewey and Boyd Bode both warned fellow Progressives that the movement was dissolving into a non-political, child-centered libertarianism instead of a comprehensive movement for social democracy.[lxxxix]  However, despite its organizational success, the actual impact of Progressive innovations on American education by the 1930s is uncertain.  The celebratory framework of most reformist literature has obscured more concrete evaluations by later historians.[xc]  C.A. Bowers pointed out that due to Progressive educator’s focus on elementary school teachers and classrooms, “the influence of the Progressive education movement was restricted to only a fraction of the nation’s 1 million teachers” – although he argued that one should not discount the wide influence of Progressive intellectuals in teacher training Education departments.  Bowers estimated that William H. Kilpatrick taught almost 35,000 students between 1909 and 1938.  Larry Cuban has made one estimate of Progressive influence on the practice of public schooling.  He argued that at its peak (between 1920-40) no more than 25% of New York public school teachers “adopted Progressive teaching practices, broadly defined, and used them to varying degrees in the classrooms.”  David Tyack, Robert Lowe, and Elisabeth Hansot argued that, overall, actual Progressive reform in public schools was a mixed bag, and to the extent that concrete Progressive reforms were initiated and retained over a long period of time, they “fared best in relatively prosperous states and districts” and “most affected children from favored social classes.  Ironically, of course, these were the groups least in need of help.”[xci]

It is important to note in more detail the radical group of Progressive educators that organized as a block during the 1930s in opposition to capitalism and New Deal liberalism.  They called themselves “Social Reconstructionists” and they were the radical wing of the Progressive education movement.  The intellectual catalyst and the most important spokesman for this group was George S. Counts whose call to arms – “Dare Progressive Education Be Progressive?” – was unleashed in 1932.  Taking inspiration from radical social scientists like Charles Beard and Thorstein Veblen, as well as the broader socialist movement, Counts published the first manifesto for the Social Reconstructionist platform in 1932, Dare the School Build a New Social Order?, which was shortly followed by The Social Foundations of Education (1934) and the more tempered writings of William H. Kilpatrick, Education and the Social Crisis (1932) and his edited volume of radical Progressive thought The Educational Frontier (1933).  Most of the social reconstructionists were first active members of the PEA, but between 1931 and 1933, these radicals expressed their desire for more militant social reform through education in the pages of Progressive Education and within PEA committees – most notably the Committee on Social and Economic Problems and its publication, A Call to the Teachers of the Nation (1933).  After Counts self-consciously raised the ideological banner of Social Reconstruction, he helped found The Social Frontier in 1934, which was then the official organ for radical Progressive thought and became a marked contrast to the more moderate views found in Progressive Education.  According to C. A. Bowers, the social Reconstructionist faction rose to prominence in the wake of the Great Depression and took control of the Progressive education movement by 1947, although by then they espoused a more moderate platform based on democratic values, like deliberation and “democratic living.”  But of course, by this time Progressive education was becoming an embattled cause.[xcii]   

By the late 1940s and early 1950s both wings of Progressive education were under widespread attack as the cultural climate in the U.S. narrowed its horizons and punished unpopular opinions.  By mid-century, America was becoming a very “counterprogressive” country.[xciii]  Lawrence Cremin noted, “The surprising thing about the Progressive response to the assault of the fifties is not that the movement collapsed, but that it collapsed so readily.”  In 1951 David Hullburd published This Happened in Pasadena chronicling the demise of Pasadena’s Progressive superintendent Willard Goslin.  John Dewey died in 1952.  The Progressive Education Association collapsed by 1955.  Progressive Education (financed by the John Dewey Society after the end of the PEA) issued its last publication in July, 1957.  And the John Dewey Society published its last yearbook in 1962 (but the organization remains active to date).  Despite the speedy demise of the movement within a decade, Lawrence Cremin was somberly optimistic about its importance.  In 1961 he noted, “the transformation” Progressive educators were able to achieve in the school system “was in many ways” “irreversible.”  He hinted that Progressive education would be back, if in fact it ever completely left: “the authentic Progressive vision remained strangely pertinent” – perhaps “awaiting” a “reformulation and resuscitation that would ultimately derive from a larger resurgence of reform in American life and thought.”  Cremin uttered these words quite self-consciously as the first comprehensive chronicler of the history Progressive education.[xciv]

Historiography of The Progressive Education Movement

As an academic pursuit in the United States, the History of Education is a relatively new field of study.  It has been around for only about 100 years and it is still arguably fighting for its status as a major disciplinary category of history.  It was originally linked to the Philosophy of Education in the late 19th century and began to emerge on its own with the publication of Source Book of the History of Education for the Greek and Roman Period (1901), which was written by a sociologist named Paul Monroe.  Monroe was asked to research the History of Education by the Dean of Teachers College at Columbia University, James Earl Russell, and Monroe would write several volumes thereafter.  Due to Monroe’s work, the History of Education emerged as a disciplinary field of study.  The first institution to offer doctoral degrees in History of Education was Teachers College at Columbia University.  Teachers College alumni produced several influential dissertations on the History of Education during the first two decades of the 20th century.[xcv] 

It was Ellwood Patterson Cubberley, the first dean of the School of Education at Stanford University, who took hold of the History of U.S. Education and strove to make it not only a thriving academic discipline, but also a professional “science.”  His monumental work toward this end was Public Education in the United States (1919).  It was an important early contribution toward the so-called “scientific” history of the early 20th century, although it suffered from the same flawed conceptions of “science” and “objectivity” as did other “scientific” works of history that emerged at the time.[xcvi]  Under the rhetoric of “science,” Cubberley’s work suffered from a selective and celebratory “Whig” interpretation of educational history and was used as a campaign tool for his own part in the Progressive educational crusade.   Despite the efforts of scholars like Cubberley, the History of Education remained a small sub-field for the first half of the 20th century and most of the major organs of historical research, including the American Historical Association, would publish only a few articles on the subject.[xcvii] 

It was not until the 1960s and the breakthrough scholarship of Bernard Bailyn and Lawrence A. Cremin, combined with the launching of the journal History of Education Quarterly, that the History of Education became a respected sub-field within the academy.[xcviii]  By this time the historical community was going through a transvaluation of values, as professional and epistemological standards were changing.  Much of the new history and historiography of U.S. education challenged old Whiggish pieties and introduced a much more complicated, fragmented, and often radical critique of American education.  The 1960’s historiographical debate within the history profession, especially within the education community, stoked the flames of a cultural divide that would fulminate into the 21st century.[xcix] 

One of the seminal works of this formative period was The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876 – 1957 (1961) by Lawrence Cremin.  It was an important and still is in many ways an unsurpassed study of the history of Progressive education.[c]  In this prizewinning book[ci] Cremin tried to sketch a full picture of not only the educational and theoretical principles of the movement, but also its intellectual and historical generation.  Like last chapter’s survey of the historiographical literature on the larger conception of “Progressivism,” we will now focus particularly on various conceptions of Progressive education so as to get some clarity about the meaning and significance of the term “Progressive” as it related to education and educational reform.  Thus, we will be restricting our historiographical discussion to one central question: What was Progressive education?  To the extent that Americanization was involved within the Progressive educational program, it will be mentioned as a topical subject, but a full analysis of the history and meaning of Americanization programs and a review of the literature on this topic will come later in the chapter.  

In The Transformation of the School, Cremin was quite clear that Progressive education was a “many-sided effort” and “marked from the very beginning by a pluralistic, frequently contradictory, character.”  He cautioned his reader that he would offer no “capsule definition of Progressive education” because “none exists, and none ever will; for throughout its history Progressive education meant different things to different people.”  However, with this caution in mind, Cremin offered several definitions with which one could define this movement.  Progressives were “moderate” reformers who believed in democracy and wanted to use education as “an adjunct to politics in realizing the promise of American life.”  He described Progressive education as “part of a vast humanitarian effort to apply the promise of American life – the ideal of government by, of, and for the people – to the puzzling new urban-industrial civilization that came into being during the later half of the nineteenth century.”  As such it was a “many-sided effort to use the schools to improve the lives of individuals” in four distinct ways: (1) a “broadening” of the school to meet and treat all areas of the community; (2) applying the new “scientific” research of educational professionals inside the classroom; (3) reshaping a student centered curriculum to meet the needs of a diverse study body; (4) instilling a “radical faith that culture could be democratized” and thereby training responsible citizens to lead the country to progress and prosperity.  A quintessential expression of the Progressive ethos came from Jane Addams, who Cremin quoted in his introduction: “We have learned to say that the good must be extended to all of society before it can be held secure by any one person or any one class; but we have not yet learned to add to that statement, that unless all men and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having.”[cii]

Cremin argued that Progressive education and its pedagogical agenda could best be defined by summarizing the seven founding principles of the Association for the Advancement of Progressive Education (or PEA).  PEA’s 1919 statement of purpose proclaimed, “The aim of Progressive Education is the freest and fullest development of the individual, based upon the scientific study of his mental, physical, spiritual, and social characteristics and needs.” The principles of this organization included: (1) children should be free to naturally develop according to both individual self-expression and the social needs of the community; (2) the learning process should include a) hands-on direct experience, b) a holistic conception of knowledge and its practical application, as well as c) self-reflexivity; (3) the teacher should guide the social and intellectual development of the child and this necessitates a) a well trained and creative teacher, b) a stimulus-rich learning environment, and c) small class sizes; (4) learning assessments should include both “objective and subjective reports” on the “physical, mental, moral, and social” aspects of the child’s development; (5) the overall wellbeing and health of the student is a primary concern; (6) the school should communicate and cooperate with the home in educational, developmental, and extracurricular endeavors; (7) the Progressive school should be a “laboratory” of “new ideas” and it should take the lead in educational initiative.[ciii] 

Cremin also evaluated the specific impacts of Progressive initiatives within the U.S. public school system.  He listed 10 points of measurable change: (1) an “extension” of education on all levels whereby more and more children were steadily attending kindergartens on through high school; (2) school system shifted to six years in elementary, three years in junior high, and three years in high school; (3) a “continuing expansion and reorganization of the curriculum at all levels;” (4) expansion of extracurricular activities; (5) “more variation and flexibility in the grouping of students;” (6) the learning environment – classroom – became more active, informal and mobile; (7) teaching materials, including textbooks, expanded to increase the interest and learning of the student; (8) the architecture of schools changed to accommodate gymnasiums, playgrounds, athletic fields, and such; (9) teachers became better trained and certified – in word, professionalized; (10) school administration became more centralized, professionalized, and bureaucratic.[civ] 

There were also some notable failures of Progressive education as well, which Cremin noted: (1) because of success and the diversity of its practitioners, it eventually suffered from schisms and the distortion of its comprehensive aims; (2) Progressives were better able to articulate “what they were against than what they were for;” (3) Progressive reforms often demanded too much time and ability from teachers; (4) after reforms were initiated, Progressives were often tied to specific programs and could not “formulate next steps;” (5) a failure to adequately deal with the conservative post-war climate; (6) professionalization of educators and administrators brought isolation from reform coalition partners in the public who were key in backing and initiating reform programs; and finally, Cremin argued, (7) Progressive educators became to attached to Progressive initiatives and too detached from the “continuing transformation of American society.”[cv]

In the third volume of Lawrence Cremin’s award winning series,[cvi] American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876 – 1980 (1988), he revisited his definition of “education” and how its meaning in the American context was tied to both nationalism and reformism.   In this volume Cremin noted that by the late 19th century education was becoming increasingly valued by the public at large and so educational reforms were becoming increasingly political conflicts.  But at the same time, Cremin pointed out, the “American paideia” had not been not settled or formalized and, thus, “Americans were still in the process of defining what it meant to be an American.”  However, this did not stop the growing corporate state and its elite WASP representatives from fashioning their own version of American identity as an Anglo Saxon “manifest destiny,” which was being actively carried over the continent and across the seas as a form of “cultural imperialism” (accompanying, of course, more traditional forms of economic and political imperialism as well).  But struggling alongside this push for a dominant American paideia modeled on WASP cultural values were “alternative American paideias” fomented by African Americans, Native Americans, and immigrant communities.  This created a “complicated” educational terrain as competing socio-cultural groups fought over the right to transmit their own diverse cultural value systems. 

It is within this context that “Americanization” programs were launched both within and outside of the pubic school system by mostly Progressive forces.   The arch-purpose of these programs was to bring a homogenized ideological order to the newly conceived “nation” and, thereby, solidify a dominant American identity with which to inculcate both children and adults so as to “assimilate” the population into what Progressive reformers believed to be the “dominant American community.”  But Cremin also noted the “pluralistic” character of the many (often “contradictory”) Progressive “movements,” and thus he dwelt a great deal on how Progressivism also contained a strand of “liberalism” that sought to “democratize the concept of culture” and promote an “inclusive politics” that addressed the “problems of inequality” within the U.S.[cvii]

The last work by Lawrence Cremin that we will note is “Education as Politics,” a lecture given in 1989.  Cremin made it clear (within the highly charged standards and multicultural educational debates of the 1980s) that “education has always served political functions.” More specifically, he claimed the educational endeavor eternally focuses on the “future character of the community” and to that extent education can never be separated from politics: “It is impossible to talk about education apart from some conception of the good life; people will inevitably differ in their conceptions of the good life, and hence they will inevitably disagree on matters of education; therefore the discussion of education fall squarely within the domain of politics.” 

Cremin argued that U.S. education has always been politicized, especially by Progressive reformers, but he tried to make the argument that it became “increasingly politicized” in the wake of Progressivism, post WWII, as many diverse groups “with differing conceptions of the good life” escalated the battle over “the nature and character of education.”  These battles ensued, Cremin pointed out, because of a longstanding U.S. Progressive tradition to use the system of education to try and “solve” all sorts of socio-political problems, “and in so doing to invest education with all kinds of millennial hopes and expectations.”  Cremin mentioned social critics like Hannah Arendt who pointed out that educational systems are limited in their ability to change the world, yet she noted that this has not stopped successive waves of Americans from trying to use education for just that purpose.[cviii]  When people battle over educational systems and curriculum, Cremin argued, they are really debating “alternative views of the good life,” especially what “kind of America they would prefer to live in and what it might mean to be an American.” 

Cremin believed Dewey to be the great philosopher of American social and political ideals in relation to its educational practices, but Dewey was not the only intellectual force to make the connection between education and politics.  Cremin argued that a “distinctively American paideia” molded out of WASP values, nationality, and patriotism became the norm during the 19th century and it demanded a “relentless” program for cultural and political “assimilation:” “the more different the newcomers from the British-American model, the more intense the manifestations of concern.”  But the process and programs of “Americanization,” Cremin argued, did not have the desired effect.  First of all, for all the rhetoric of a unified WASP paideia, it was never completely realized, and it was often “loosely and variously defined:” The American norm to which school children were “supposed to be assimilating often proved confusing and elusive.”  Second, the American paideia began to change in relation to the ever evolving context of American society.  And finally, deep seated racism in all parts of the U.S. gave rise to many severe restrictions and rejections of specific minority communities based on their assumed inferiorities.  This in turn gave rise to many protest movements over the course of the 20th century and a vigorous debate over “precisely what it meant to be an American.”  Cremin ended his essay by noting that American identity has always “inevitably depend[ed]” on the complex and changing “interaction” of the diverse U.S. population.  He also reiterated the limited, yet central, role of education within past and present debates on Americanism: “Education cannot take the place of politics, though it is inescapably involved in politics, and education is rarely a sufficient instrument for achieving political goals, though it is almost always a necessary condition for achieving political goals.”[cix]

If Lawrence Cremin was the first major historian of U.S. education, his seminal reputation was eclipsed not a generation later by the work of David B. Tyack, professor of Education and History at Stanford University.  Tyack has authored and co-authored a host of seminal works that have focused on various reform initiatives during the 19th and 20th centuries.  We will be surveying several of his major works. 

His first major book was The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (1974).  This book focused on the “politics” of education by which Tyack meant “who got what, where, when, and how.”  Tyack wanted to study not only the decision makers who initiated reform, but also those segments of the American population (the “poor and dispossessed) who were marginalized from the political process and, thereby, often the passive recipients of reform programs.  Being largely left out of political decisions, the poor were often “victimize[ed]” “predictab[ly] and regular[ly]” by “systematic” reform initiatives that were not drafted or implemented in their interests.  And further, these “victims” of systematic injustice were often blamed for their own marginalization.  In framing his discussion around the issue of justice, Tyack’s study invoked (while criticizing) Progressive principles.  He primarily sought to expose the “systemic injustice” at the root of Progressive reforms, which meant a focus not on individuals per se but on the institutions within the “social system” that created and reinforced an atmosphere of injustice:

“It is more important to expose and correct the injustice of the social system than to scold its agents.  Indeed, one of the chief reasons for the failures of educational reforms of the past has been precisely that they called for a change of philosophy or tactics on the part of the individual school employee rather than systemic change – and concurrent transformations in the distribution of power and wealth in the society as a whole…Despite frequent good intentions and abundant rhetoric about “equal educational opportunity,” schools have rarely taught the children of the poor effectively – and this failure has been systematic, not idiosyncratic.  Talk about “keeping the schools out of politics” has often served to obscure actual alignments of power and patterns of privilege.  Americans have often perpetuated social injustice by blaming the victim, particularly in the case of institutionalized racism…The search for conspiracies of villains is a fruitless occupation; to the extent that there was deception, it was largely self-deception.  But to say that institutionalized racism, or unequal treatment of the poor, or cultural chauvinism were unconscious or unintentional does not erase their effects on children.”

Tyack was also lending his skills as a scholar toward a broader initiative of “social justice,” which he argued (also working out of a Progressive conception) could be found “in the old goal of a common school, reinterpreted in radically reformed institutions.”[cx]

Tyack looked mostly at the urban reforms of a growing urban society.  Administrative Progressives believed that the older systems of rural schools in the U.S. were too haphazardly organized, inefficient, substandard, and too “subordinated” to community interests.  Reformers, especially urban reformers, thought that rural communities were backwards and ignorant of the complex needs of modern society.

Progressive reformers “blended economic realism with nostalgia, efficient professionalism with evangelical righteousness” so as to initiate a complex re-ordering, nationalization, and professionalization of the public school system.  They wanted to engineer the “one best system” of education that could create a “standardized, modernized ‘community’ in which leadership came from the professionals.”  While cloaked in the rhetoric of democracy, the needs of society, and the education of all, Progressive school reforms in urban areas were more about reconstituting the nature of authority in order to “transfer of power from laymen to professionals,” and thereby, create a nationalized (and standardized) educational bureaucracy.  The results of this restructuring did lead to “better school buildings, a broader and more contemporary course of studies, and better qualified teachers and administrators,” while also giving “country youth greater occupational mobility” and introducing them to “different life-styles.”[cxi] 

But there was also a darker side to urban reforms.  In a search for the “one best system,” administrative Progressives continually stressed “order” and “standardization.”  It was a program of “institutionalization” to combat the social chaos of modernity in urban America.  William T. Harris, superintendent of schools in St. Louis, asserted in his School Report for 1871, “The first requisite of the school is Order: each pupil must be taught first and foremost to conform his behavior to a general standard.”[cxii]  School modernization and professionalization was modeled on the factory system of bureaucratic division of labor and it often reinforced principles like punctuality, chain of command, coordination, systematizing, hierarchical organization, impersonal rules, regularized procedures, objective standards, efficiency, rationality, and precision.  In some cases reformers sought professional bureaucracies so as to promote a more equalized “meritocracy” that would serve all segments of the urban community impartially and fully.  However, the “rational” bureaucratic systems of education often “reinforced racial, religious, and class privilege,” as well as normalizing “subordination” of students and teachers to the authority of white, male school administrators.  WASP professionals simply assumed that their values and interests as “honest and competent experts” were universal goods and, thus, under their control “public education was the most human form of social control and the safest method of social renewal.” [cxiii]               

Prefiguring a later book, David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot published “From Social Movement to Professional Management: An Inquiry into the Changing Character of Leadership in Public Education” (1980).  In this article Tyack and Hansot “interpret[ed] changing forms of leadership in public education” from the 19th to the 20th centuries.  The common school reformers largely shared a “Protestant-republican ideology” and engaged in an evangelical process of “nation building” through a “millennial” crusade to create a “righteous society.”  Common school reformers were lead by charismatic leaders whose main tools were exhortation and persuasion based on a shared Protestant-republican ideology: “leadership in public education largely took the form of guiding a decentralized social movement because the chief task was the creation of common schools through the mobilization of opinion and effort at the local level.”  20th century reformers believed in “social efficiency,” by which they meant organizational reforms resulting in “new structures and processes of schooling that would enable public education to mesh smoothly and efficiently with a corporate society.”  These professional school men sought to “take the school out of politics” by centralizing school authority, consolidating children in larger schools, standardizing curriculum, and normalizing a bureaucratic-business model of education: “Believing that the basic structure of society was just and Progressive, the new leaders thought that they knew how to bring about a smoothly running, socially efficient, and stable society in which education was the major form of human engineering.” 

Tyack and Hansot emphasized that these two movements were “not so sharply distinct” and that there was “significant overlap between the two eras.”  Both movements shared in the continuity of organizational structuring and expansion that started with the common school leadership.  Tyack and Hansot argue that the grass-roots initiated common school movement was the “most impressive case of institution building in American history.”  Its success was largely due to a homogeneous leadership core, which shared similar ideological orientations and social and economic interests.  These reformers wanted to create a national system of Christian common schools in which a “Protestant paideia” would “express and perpetuate” their shared socio-cultural values and “civic purpose.”  Tyack and Hansot argued that part of the “genius” of this movement “was that its leaders were able to wrap their cause in a noncontroversial Americanism,” which legitimated their effort by consecrating the Protestant-republican ideology as both a “social mandate” and a national mission.  Early 20th century reformers worked within the earlier common-school tradition while engineering an organizational “revolution” so as to reconfigure the established American paideia for an industrial, corporate capital nation-state.[cxiv]

Tyack and Hansot later expanded “From Social Movement to Professional Management” into a book on the same topic.  In Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820 – 1980 (1982), Tyack and Hansot re-examined the 19th century common school movement that created the U.S. educational system.  In structuring their conceptual framework, Tyack and Hansot incorporated much of the “radical critique” of public schooling that historians had written since the late 1960s.[cxv]  Tyack and Hansot argued that 19th century common school reformers saw their educational program as part of a larger mission of consolidating and consecrating a “Christian nation” based on “patriotism, godliness, and prosperity.”  The project of American nationalism converged with the reformer’s visions of the Kingdom of God, whereby, an idealized version of the republic demanded righteous citizens engaged in a providential project.  Common school reformers rarely acknowledged their own socio-cultural “blinders” and pontificated as if they spoke for all Americans, thereby, programmatically trying to assimilate citizens and immigrants alike into a chauvinistic WASP “version of Americanism.”  In the words of one enthusiastic commentator: “American is Protestantism…Protestantism is Life, is Light, is Civilization, is the spirit of the age.  Education with all its adjuncts, is Protestantism.  In fact Protestantism is education itself.”  Tyack and Hansot argued that the American common school movement was the “most ambitious and successful social movement” of the 19th century.  By century’s end, it was able to create “more schooling for more people than in any other nation and resulted in patterns of education that were remarkably uniform in purpose, structure, and curriculum, despite the reality of local control in hundreds of thousands of separate communities.”[cxvi]

Progressive reformers around the turn of the 20th century carried on similar activities, but with a slightly different focus.  They sustained the “earlier moral earnestness and sense of mission” of the common school reformers, although Progressives lost “much of the specifically religious content” for a more secular nationalism.  Progressives sought to “control the course of human evolution scientifically through improving education.”  Progressives used a rhetoric of “moral charisma and millennial hope” to sanctify their “dream” of “professionalism” and “social efficiency.”  Believing whole-heartedly in the “myth” of progress, Progressives saw themselves as “social engineers who sought to bring about a smoothly meshing corporate society,” and thereby, “redesign” the public schools to compliment this project.   Of course this meant “constraining” public oversight in the schooling process so that public education could become a “professionalized” endeavor that prepared students for their subordinate places in the emerging, modern mass-industrial society.[cxvii]    

Tyack and Hansot described administrative Progressives as part of a self-conscious leadership elite (several prominent administrative Progressives described their select group as the “educational trust”).  They saw themselves as “professional managers” who were able to reshape the public school system “according to cannons of business efficiency and scientific expertise.”  These administrative Progressives used a rhetoric of “science and business efficiency” in order to reshape the discourse of public schooling in terms of “problems to be solved by experts.”  They believed that “experts would run everything to everyone’s benefit.”  This rhetoric helped legitimize institutional reforms whereby educational power was “consolidated” in “large and centralized organizations” that were modeled after corporate structures: “In seeking to depoliticize education, in moving the regulation of education upward and inward in urban and state bureaucracies, in basing legitimation for new authority on scientific expertise, the new managers in education were following patterns of action and thought pioneered in the corporate sector of business.”  And while the schools were operating more and more like corporate organizations, they were also legitimizing the gross inequality and hierarchy of an industrial mass-society under the cover of a meritocratic equality of opportunity that was supposedly being taught in the public schools.  But Tyack and Hansot make clear that the administrative Progressives were contested at every turn and their vision of public schooling was not the only administrative program.  However, “the ideology of depoliticized expertise splintered opposition and defused the effectiveness of protest” and thus the “ideology of professionalism” was able to entrench the vision and program of administrative Progressives within the centralized, bureaucratic public school system that remains to this day.[cxviii]

In later work, David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, along with Robert Lowe, researched Progressive education during the Great Depression in Public Schools in Hard Time: The Great Depression and Recent Years (1984).  Their emphasis fell on the “complex interaction” of the “political economy of public education” during the Great Depression years and, specifically, how the process and organization of schooling was effected by the tug and pull of “local governance and finance, of growing assertions of state power, and of national influence of various kinds exerted largely through powerful private organizations.”  They demonstrated how “pluralistic patterns of interests and power” orchestrated “quite different results in different places.”  Tyack et. al. also discussed the 1930’s as the possible “high point” of Progressive education, but acknowledged that different historians have used the “foggy concept” to refer to “many different ideas and practices” so its quite hard to make an argument for its peak. 

The conceptual muddle of “Progressivism” was not helped by the reformers penchant for negative ideological maneuvering (what they were against) instead of positive programmatic statements (what they were for).  There was also the added difficulty of distinguishing between “what leaders said” and “what actually happened behind the schoolhouse door.”  The authors noted that Progressive education as a historical concept refers to many “kinds of reformers” who “thought of themselves as Progressive,” who defined the significance of “Progressive” in many different ways, and who worked for organizational and curricular modification to meet the needs of changing historical circumstances as they saw it.  Social Reconstructionists, reformist administrators, libertarians, and liberals all had a different vision and program of Progressive education.  To the extent that “Progressive” reforms in education happened during the Great Depression, it was most significantly a “classroom affair, a new kind of interaction between the teacher and the students,” most likely highly varied between different classrooms, schools, and districts, but also limited in terms of the power of tradition teaching practice and cutbacks due to fiscal retrenchment. 

The authors also noted that as specific cultural and historical contexts dictated, “Progressive methods could be used to serve conservative ends,” specifically they mention how “Progressive” reforms rarely if even confronted the structural inequalities associated with race and class.  The black school reformer and Progressive Horace Mann Bond articulated this issue clearly at the time (he has often been left out of most historical discussions of “Progressive” education as have other back school reformers of the period).  In “The Curriculum and the Negro Child,” Bond wrote: “The schools have never built a new social order, but have always in all times in all lands been the instrument through which social forces were perpetuated.”  Tyack et. al. maintained that no significant widespread “Progressive” changes occurred during the Great Depression years.  The organizational and curricular operations of public schools “changed very little,” and to the extent there were reforms initiated, the can be seen as “short-term dislocations” in the midst of “long-term continuity.”[cxix]

Outside of the preeminent work of the two leading History of Education scholars, Lawrence Cremin and David Tyack, there have been many other important works published on both Progressive education history and the larger history of educational reform that surrounds this particular movement.  One important early work was by C. A. Bowers in 1969, The Progressive Educator and the Depression: The Radical Years.  Bowers argued that there were two factions within the Progressive educational movement.  The more powerful and mainstream faction represented a romantically oriented “cult of the child” and they articulated a child-centered pedagogy.  The other faction came to be known as the “Social Reconstructionists.” They wanted the schools to be part of a larger effort to address current social problems so as to use the schools to reform society.  The Social Reconstructionists used the rhetoric of class struggle to advocate a platform of social planning and socialistic collectivity. 

When George S. Counts gave his landmark speech, “Dare Progressive Education Be Progressive?” in 1932, he was both criticizing the movement’s political neutrality and urging Progressive educators, specifically members of the PEA, to forsake moderate liberal reformism in order to embrace more radical educational, social and political pieties.  Counts of course meant the rejection of capitalism so that schools could embrace and propagate socialism.  To further this mission, Counts wanted teachers to become political actors inside the nation’s classrooms and, thereby, not be afraid to use “indoctrination’ to “check and challenge” capitalist dogma.  Counts believed that schools would indoctrinate students no matter what and, thus, the question became, in whose interests would the public school curriculum serve? 

The Social Reconstructionists had a very definite idea.  In a PEA pamphlet drafted by the Committee on Social and Economic Problems, A Call to the Teachers of the Nation (1934), they exhorted teachers to reject capitalism and renew American democracy: “[teachers] owe nothing to the present economic system, except to improve it; they owe nothing to any privileged caste, except to strip it of its privileges…a powerful organization, militantly devoted to the building of a better social order and to the fulfillment…of the democratic aspirations of the American people.”  Bowers called this “one of the most extreme and utopian statements to be made by any group during the depression” – even more so than the 1934 Manifesto of the Communist Party of the U.S.A.[cxx]

Bowers critiqued the Social Reconstructionists, usually by surveying the criticisms of their contemporaries; Progressive educationalists like John Dewey and Boyd Bode made many trenchant critiques.  Bowers noted several.  The Social Reconstructionists had an “ubiquitous sense of mission,” which harkened back to the evangelical millennialism of the common school reformers; they often espoused a simplistic utopianism; and they had a romantic conception of the “power of education to eradicate the evil in the world.”  Bowers also called the Social Reconstructionists “poor social analysts” because they “lacked an understanding of the teacher’s actual position in society:” “Even though teachers had no real protection from being dismissed arbitrarily by school boards – and they thus possessed neither economic security nor the ability to formulate significant policy – the Social Reconstructionists viewed them as a force capable of directing social change.”  Bowers argued that these educational radicals took a position too extreme to align themselves with labor and to infatuated with the schools to fit well with the Communists, which made their call for teachers to lead the class struggle seem ridiculous to most observers.  Bowers quipped, “the editor’s messianic zeal had led them far down the road of absurdity.”  Alienating themselves from other Progressives and ignored by other radicals, the Social Reconstructionists eventually abandoned their radical socialism.  They took a conservative turn during the war, which intensified afterwards.  Calls for class war were exchanged for slogans urging the saving of democracy and the fighting of totalitarianism.  Ironically, after their journal folded, the more moderate Social Reconstructionists took the field as the most powerful and influential Progressive educators and exerted an important authority over curricular debates in the late 1940s.  The message had now become community centered schools, democratic deliberation, democratic cooperation, and fostering “democratic living.”  This “new doctrine” would have wide and lasting imprint on the American public schools, but would eventually be rhetorically co-opted more conservative forces in the 1950s.[cxxi]

In “Education and Progressivism,” Joel Spring argued that “Progressivism” had been used and defined so broadly, specifically Cremin’s use of the term in The Transformation of the School, that it was “a valueless definition since it literally includes everyone.”  Spring criticized the “lack of clarity” and “confused picture” that this “vague” and “obscure” term identified.  He instead called for a more “sharply defined” conceptual terminology of educational reform based on the particulars of various reformist ideology.  Specifically Spring suggested that reformer’s visions “of the good life” – the ultimate purposes reformers were trying to produce in changing individuals and society – could be the best way to conceptualize distinct “reform” movements.  Spring focused on one example in his article: the movement for “social efficiency.”[cxxii]

Herbert M. Kliebard followed Spring’s lead in 1986 when he published the 1st of three editions of his very influential book, The Struggle for the American Curriculum.  Kliebard completely denied the existence of a Progressive educational “movement:” 

“The more I studied [Progressive education] the more it seemed to me that the term encompassed such a broad range, not just of different, but of contradictory, ideas on education as to be meaningless.  In the end, I came to believe that the term was not only vacuous but mischievous.  It was not just the word “Progressive” that I thought was inappropriate but the implication that something deserving a single name existed and that something could be identified and defined if we only tried.”

Instead he argued for competing “interest groups” with “distinct” “ideological positions” and “agendas for action.”  These factions contemporaneously co-existed in often “antagonistic” ways, each with its own reform agenda, although sometimes they were able to bury differences in order to form “temporary coalitions around a particular reform.”  During what has been called the Progressive era, these antagonistic factions “struggled for control of the American curriculum” and the 20th century became an educational “battleground.”  Often these groups were fighting over the core issue of “differing forms of knowledge” legitimating specific cultural values.  Kliebard focused on only four interest groups that represented the major educational divisions at the turn of the century.  The most powerful was the entrenched “humanist” group and three reform groups challenging the humanist hegemony were the child study movement, the social efficiency movement, and the social meliorists.  Outside the fray, yet infused within it, Kliebard uniquely argued, was the towering figure of John Dewey who while not directly allied with any one group, he helped define and critique the perimeters of 20th century educational reform.[cxxiii]     

Kliebard refined and articulated his epistemological position with regards to the conceptual territory of “Progressivism” in a 1993 “Afterword” to the 2nd edition entitled “The Search for Meaning: Curriculum Conflict in the Context of Status Politics.”  He claimed that Progressive education was no more than a “mélange of reforms” that have been “lumped together” under a common term.  This was due in a large part to Lawrence Cremin’s seminal use of the phrase.  While Cremin warned against any one definition, he equated it with “the educational phase of American Progressivism writ large.”  Edward A. Krug’s two volumes on the Shaping of the American High School prefigured the turn of direction that would occur in the 1970s when the vagueness and vacuity of the phrase “Progressive movement” was questioned (by Filene and Spring among others), ultimately to be rejected and jettisoned by an influential minority within the historical community.  In its place came two new epistemological uses.  One was a restricted definition of “Progressive” attached to narrower historical entities, like Tyack’s use of “administrative Progressives.”  The other use focused on the “politically and socially regressive nature” of many so called “Progressive” reforms.  Kliebard noted tongue in cheek: “We are left with the feeling that much of what went on in the Progressive era was socially and politically, and perhaps even pedagogically, regressive.”  Thus instead of even using the term “Progressive,” historians like Kliebard have instead looked for ideologically distinct social, political, and educational “movements” that are much more clear and distinguishable in their affiliations, goals, programs, and practices – “persons identified with a movement, in other words, see themselves as sharing common programs or beliefs.”  Using this methodology and narrowing the definition of a “movement” ala Peter G. Filene, Kliebard questioned “Progressivism” out of existence: “Once a movement is understood in this way, one can then go on to determine whether the term Progressive can legitimately be applied to such a collective, but it is not clear at all that such a collective exists…In short, neither in terms of the coherence of the program for reform nor in its membership nor in its overall ideology can a definition of Progressivism as a social and political movement be articulated.”

Instead of using the terminology of Progressivism, Kliebard formulated his own position, which rested on three points.  First, Progressivism cannot be defined “in terms of stable attributes.”  Second, specific ideological subgroups can be identified and their more “consistent and recognizable ideological positions” can be conceptualized.  And third, all reform issues could be complicated by reform coalitions that could consist of a blending of various distinct ideological sub-groups.  Thus, Kliebard’s conception of “Progressive education” was a broadly sweeping “reaction against tradition structures and practices but with multiple ideological positions and programs of reform.”  This broad “reaction” is composed of distinct and “reasonably coherent subgroups and movements,” but in no way do all these pieces “add up to one Progressive education movement.”  Hence the central term “struggle” in the title of Kliebard’s book.  The American curriculum was “contested terrain” and “the prize for which the various interest groups competed.”[cxxiv]    

The political scientist Paul E. Peterson wrote The Politics of School Reform, 1870 – 1940 (1985) in which he used quantitative methods to study three different urban school systems (Atlanta, Chicago, and San Francisco) in an effort to examine the particulars of late 19th and early 20th century educational reform in three unique historical contexts.

In an effort to caution against generalizations, Peterson argued, “diverse participants focused on those specific objectives in which they had the greatest stake.  Although some related their specific demands to larger views of the good society, their demands were met by counterclaims with alternative visions:” “Each of these groups had their own distinctive sets of interests; no stable alliance among any two of them was able to determine policy choice in all situations; instead, outcomes in particular instances fluctuated as different coalitions came together in an ever-changing series of uneasy alliances.”  School policy was a constant battle ground between competing factions.  In order to gain “legitimacy,” Peterson argued, school officials tried to “separate themselves, as institutions, from particular groups and factions:” “No one social group held sufficient economic and political power to dictate the course of school policy.  The ultimate winners in such an uncertain contest were, of course, the schools themselves.  As organizations, they could only prosper from contests and conflicts among competing interests.”  It is out of this complex historical environment that the “politics of institutionalization” took place, whereby, urban educational leaders sought “expansion and professionalization” so as to make public schools an “organized system of autonomous power” within politically divided, fiscally strained, and ethnically contentious communities.[cxxv] 

Peterson’s study paid particular attention to a “threefold system” of social “stratification” in industrial America differentiated by class, status, and political power – especially in relation to the “noticeably inegalitarian” “structure of educational institutions:”[cxxvi] education was a class based institution that “declare[ed] one’s social worth” and “validat[ed] the status of social groups.”  Education was “a prize to be won by each social group in order for that group’s culture to be affirmed, legitimated, and perpetuated.”  To the extent the public schooling became an agent of “cultural imperialism,” Peterson argued, it did so not by “compulsory instruction” but by “the exclusion of a group from pubic schooling.”  Peterson criticized the historical argument that 19th century public schools were used to control and train “docile work force.”  In stead he argued that public school officials “ignored” ethnic immigrants and the poor “until adequate facilities had been extended to the more favored:” “Instead of insisting on attendance in publicly controlled institutions, they allowed foreigners to go to their own schools.  Instead of keeping potential troublemakers under their watchful eyes, the poorest, most outcast segments of the community went uneducated altogether.”  But as public schools became more and more “open” and “responsive” to changing community needs, the common pattern of school reform in relation to racial minorities was to give “separate” or “inadequate facilities,” or to keep them “completely excluded from education.”[cxxvii]

Peterson argued that “were it not for widespread citizen involvement in politics, it is likely that the status differences in a culturally pluralistic society would have led to systematic repression of minorities.”  Local organizations, business, and labor involvement where also at work in expanding the school curriculum: politically powerful ethnic minorities were able to get bilingual education, like the Germans in San Francisco and Chicago; business leaders argued for cheap “basic” education and also manual training; and labor wanted both vocational and a diversified liberal arts curriculum.  Peterson noted,

“By the end of the century the debate over the purposes of public education was subtly shifted from questions of cultural incorporation and citizenship to those of compatibility with the demands of the labor market.  Thus businessmen could attack foreign-language instruction, music, and some forms of manual training as frivolous departures from the fundamental purposes of public education at the same time that they called for additional courses in the practical skills required for growing industrial economies.  Working-class and ethnic groups, on the other hand, defended the differentiated curriculum as an essential ingredient of a democratic society.  At the same time, these groups sought practical courses that would widen avenues of economic opportunity.  School officials, for their part, maneuvered to protect and expand their organization in the context of these changing political pressures.”

This diverse political context was also complicated by the clash of ethnic groups in an American environment of “native dominance” by self professed Anglo Saxons.  Peterson argued, based on the evidence he found, “schools were uninterested in (or incapable of) systematic ethnic discrimination” in terms of access to classrooms and resource allocation because school officials were mostly concerned with consolidating their institutional autonomy in the face of hostile local party machines – although he did qualify this statement by acknowledging that quantitative data cannot “address the quality of the educational experience of children from various ethnic groups” where “ethnic discrimination” most likely happened.[cxxviii]

But growing acceptance of ethnic diversity within the public school system was not the whole story.  At the same time, many schools across the country practiced a systemic exclusion and segregation of specific minority populations.  Peterson focused on the institutional treatment of blacks, Japanese and Chinese populations.  Peterson’s general explanation for segregation and exclusion of particular ethnic minorities in the U.S. was the lack of political power: “If the group could not impose sanctions on elected officials, the schools were content to provide only the legal minimum, ignoring the barrage of pleas and petitions from the minority.  In most cases, political resources were difficult to accumulate because racial minorities either were explicitly denied the right to vote or were left out of the dominant political coalitions.”  After emancipation blacks in the South were eager for education, but during the later 19th century, they were not only educated separately in segregated and overcrowded facilities (often excluding many students because there was not enough room), but those facilities were also “markedly inferior” and school supplies where often lacking.  Blacks were also excluded from secondary schools until 1920.  But they had a strong desire for schooling and measure of political power, which they were able to use effectively up until 1892 in order to receive “concrete” educational concessions.  However, blacks began to be systematically disenfranchised in 1892 when the Jim Crow South initiated the white primary and voter restrictions and, thus, from 1892 until 1940s blacks found it even harder to improve their meager system of segregated education in the South.  In Chicago blacks were able to integrate somewhat into the public schools because they were such a small minority, although when the black population increased by the 1920s de facto segregation ensued and their segregated schools suffered in similar ways as did southern black schools. 

Because they were such a small minority in San Francisco, blacks were integrated into the public school system in 1875.  But the Chinese, constituting about 9% of the population of San Francisco in 1880, were systematically prevented from any public education until 1884 when a lawsuit allowed segregated schooling, which became the norm well into the 20th century.  The Japanese students were allowed to attend integrated schools in San Francisco only because of the considerable support of the Japanese government, which used diplomatic leverage with President Roosevelt.  Peterson emphasized that many minority populations in the U.S. had to first fight for their right to public schooling (which usually resulted in segregated schools), then they had to fight for educational improvements, and finally they had to fight for integration.  Minority success in each stage was the result of “changes in their political status” and as minorities “gained their political rights, their rights to public education also came to be recognized:” “Reform was much more – and much less – than a class struggle, and reformers were often much more – and much less – than a class-conscious elite who imposed their interests and values on a resistant working-class majority.  Reform was itself as complex, uncertain, and pluralistic as many of the other forces shaping urban schools.”[cxxix]      

In 1981 William J. Reese published an award winning paper, “’Partisans of the Proletariat’: The Socialist Working Class and the Milwaukee Schools, 1890 – 1920,” [cxxx] in which he argued that many histories on “Progressivism” and “Progressive education” have focused too much on “new” middle class professionals and, thereby, have ignored other social groups active at the time, like the urban poor, labor groups, and local socialist parties.  He argued that “studies written from the top of the educational system down are certainly valuable, though limited in terms of understanding the process of social change in the schools.”[cxxxi]  Reese argued that the poor and laboring classes were not simply “powerless” and therefore “victimized” by an urban elite.  He suggested instead that at the local level radical politics and third-party movements had some political success, and that the “Progressive” era was at the same time “the golden age of Socialism and labor radicalism.” 

Reese examined Milwaukee, which in 1910 was the first city in the U.S. to be politically swept by a socialist party.  Reese detailed the diversity of the socialist “working class”[cxxxii] and how through a complex historical process it became “intertwined” and engaged in a “symbiotic relationship” with non-socialist groups (middle-class women’s groups, Progressive civic groups, and other voluntary associations) in order to form coalitions to address specific reform issues.  Through the process of reform coalition, these diverse reform groups interacted and influenced each other socially and politically, and while they differed fundamentally on “ultimate ends,” they were able to come to some agreement and find common ground on “immediate programs” like adding free lunch programs or playgrounds to the public school.  The Progressive education “movement” from the 1890s to the 1920s, Reese argued, was no more than an “amalgamation of different groups of people who had assembled at different points in time in response to the unique circumstances of Milwaukee politics,” and when the times changed during WWI and the coalitions fell apart, the “pieces” of the movement “could not be pieced together again.”

Reese and Kenneth Teitelbaum revisited socialist educational reformers in another article a few years later, “American Socialist Pedagogy and Experimentation in the Progressive Era: The Socialist Sunday School” (1983).[cxxxiii]  In this article Reese and Teitelbaum emphasized the socialist commitment to education.  They noted that while socialist groups and parties did align in political coalitions with “liberal Progressives and other radicals” over public school reform issues, they also had strong educational initiatives of their own, like the international Socialist Sunday school movement.  These schools sought in most causes to supplement the public school education of working class children by teaching them democracy, “the socialist spirit,” and “cooperative effort,” so as to instill in them the socialist cause and hopefully produce “good rebels.”  The authors argued for a more diverse understanding of educational reforms during the Progressive era and claimed that the “significance of the Socialist Sunday schools lies in their very existence” as a “dynamic opposition movement to the public school influences of the day.”      

Reese expanded these early efforts on socialistic reform groups and published his important study, Power and the Promise of School Reform: Grassroots Movements During the Progressive Era (1986).  In this book Reese focused on the diversity of school reformers during the Progressive era and argued that school reform was “a battleground between various contending interests.”  School reform was such a contentious issue because a “single system of schools tried to serve a plurality of competing interests.”  Reese’s study looked at the “social conflict” and partisan wrangling over specific educational reforms in Rochester, Toledo, Milwaukee, and Kansas City.  He emphasized how actual reforms came into being through the “interaction between many competing forces:” “school innovation and reform were produced by interaction, resistance, adaptation, and accommodation, with the power of capital clearly in a dominant though never unchallenged position.”[cxxxiv]

Reese noted that many prominent middle class, professional, and business elites regarded the public schools as the foundation of a stable social and economic order, and also, as a reporter for the Kansas City’s Democratic Times claimed, the “handmaiden of economic growth.”  But the rising control and centralization by urban elites was contested at every turn by many grassroots organizations.[cxxxv]  Reese called this process a “dialectics of school reform.”  There was a “constant exchange,” Reese argued, between “those who would centralize and those who would decentralize power.”  There was also cooperation as “shifting coalitions” would come together temporarily on different issues to campaign for municipal reform.  Reese noted one issue in particular that was popular and was able to unite various ideological groups: the overall expansion of the social functions of public schooling, like playgrounds, lunches, and medical care.  But with the coming of WWI the “spirit of civic activism” collapsed and the community became polarized, thus undermining “faith in cooperation” and bringing to an end the “remarkable era of grassroots Progressivism.”[cxxxvi]

The black historian and Progressive Horace Mann Bond published “Education in the South” in 1939.  In this article he agreed with the unabashed fascist Lawrence Dennis that schools were often the “instrument of a dominant elite” and that these elites have used education as a form of “social control.”  While he criticized Dennis, Bond criticized American education even more when he wrote: “The concept of social forces has not been neglected in application to educational institutions in America as a whole.”  But Bond emphasized the South where the “dominant planting aristocracy” has used public schools “to maintain both the structure of social classes and that of racial caste” in order to protect their economic and social interests.  Bond noted that “the masses of white people in Southern States have, slowly and grudgingly, fought toward the achievement of systems of universal education for white children,” but blacks were left largely outside the push for reform.  Bond ended his article by saying that black education may improve, but as long as the “determination of control” lay with powerful, white, racist elites, “we may expect to flow inevitably educational structures that are the instruments of the dominant social and economic class which creates and controls them.”[cxxxvii]    

Taking a page from Bond, James D. Anderson published an important addition to the Progressive education literature, although it was not really about Progressive education.  It was rather an indictment of the educational establishment, which failed to enact truly “Progressive” reforms as far as the second-class education of blacks in South was concerned.  In The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860 – 1935 (1988), Anderson argued for a new understanding of American education in relation to its tortured history with African Americans:

“It is crucial…to recognize that within American democracy there have been classes of oppressed people and that there have been essential relationships between popular education and the politics of oppression.  Both schooling for democratic citizenship and schooling for second class citizenship have been basic traditions in American education…Black education developed within this context of political and economic oppression.”

Anderson made it clear that during the late 19th and early 20th centuries both Northern and Southern whites were in many ways “white supremacists” and “insisted on a second-class education” for blacks in order to accommodate them for “subordinate roles in the southern economy.”[cxxxviii] 

Anderson argued that in black educational circles Book T. Washington stood virtually alone in pandering to white gradualism by developing the Hampton-Tuskegee Idea which offered only industrial education.  Most black educators, black families, and black students wanted a liberal arts style education, just like the majority of white students received.  In regards to education, and much else, Anderson characterized blacks as a “responsible and politically self-conscious social class.”  But due to their subordinate and disenfranchised position, blacks were largely unable to get what they wanted educationally (not to mention politically).  Both white Southern educationalists and Northern educational philanthropists shared a certain “unity of belief in white supremacy,” which largely restricted (and sometimes outright forced) the channels of black education into segregated, inferior, and mostly industrial education.  Many white Southerners felt that school was “inappropriate” for blacks because “learning will spoil the nigger for work.”  Those white Southerners who conceded the need for black education wanted an educational system that would properly control blacks so as to keep them a permanent class of exploited labor.  Northern white missionaries and philanthropists were infused by a combination of white supremacy, paternalism, and democratic idealism.  They wanted blacks to have the Hampton/Tuskeegee model of education so that blacks would become skilled, secure and satisfied in their position as exploited labor.  Not surprisingly the Hampton/Tuskeegee model of education often resembled slave labor with the “educational” curriculum consisting of 10-11 hours of agricultural work a day (for 6-7 days a week) supplemented with some evening classes for the more intellectually gifted.  Anderson concluded his study by focusing on the frustrated struggle of blacks for educational opportunity: “The education of blacks in the South reveals that various contending forces sought either to repress the development of black education or to shape it in ways that contradicted black’s interests in intellectual development.  The educational outcomes demonstrate that blacks go some but not much of what they wanted.  They entered emancipation with fairly definite ideas about how to integrate education into their broader struggle for freedom and prosperity, but they were largely unable to shape their future in accordance with their social vision.”[cxxxix]

In the late 1970s and early 80s Ronald K. Goodenow wrote a series of articles dealing with Progressive education and questions of race and ethnicity.  In these articles he made clear that “Progressivism” is a “complex and shifting phenomenon” that “defies easy definition” and thus he warned that historical “over-generalization is dangerous”[cxl]  We will be looking at two of his papers that dealt with the broader themes of Progressivism covered in this essay. 

His article, “The Progressive Educator, Race and Ethnicity in the Depression Years: An Overview,” dealt with two scholarly omissions in the historical literature on the Progressive era.  Few historians had scrutinized the views of white Progressive educators on race and ethnicity, and few had looked at the “contribution of blacks and ethnics to Progressive education.”  Goodenow noted that some members of the PEA and many social reconstructionists did discuss racial discrimination and attempt to theorize ethnic conflict, although they generally organized their views around an assimilationist/Americanization framework.  Goodenow argued that there were two basic positions that Progressive educators took: “social-structural and institutional” determinants of racial discrimination (Dewey, Counts, Mabel Carney, and Buell Gallagher), and “cultural and psychological” causes of racial prejudice (Kilpatrick and Rugg).  The PEA as an organization discussed race and ethnicity within the confines of the Commission on Intercultural Education (1936-38), but the initiatives of this commission generally ignored structural-institutional determinants of racism and ended up stressing a depoliticized “cultural contribution” approach in an effort to promote national unity, tolerance, and democracy.    

This article also looked at Southern Progressivism, which as an educational program was mostly concerned with the “modernization” of Southern schools, i.e. standardized curriculum, teacher professionalization, and centralized control of schools.  Outside of a few notable exceptions (Mabel Carney and Buell Gallagher), there was little effort done to address race in the South except of course to reinforce segregationist and paternalist social control.  One Southern state curriculum guide explicitly stated that blacks were “a constant menace to the health of the community, a constant threat to its peace and security, and a constant cause of and excuse for the retarded progress of the other race.”  Despite the pious and often empty rhetoric of white reformers, which could serve conservative as well as Progressive ends, blacks were highly interested in Progressivism and generally saw “considerable potential” in using Progressive-democratic rhetoric to their advantage.  By turning Progressive rhetoric against white moderates it became “more difficult for them openly to oppose democratic change.”  There were also liberal black critics of Progressivism, like Horace Mann Bond, who criticized most Progressive programs for not addressing the structural-institutional determinants of racial oppression and for assuming that a “democratic social order” existed in which blacks could democratically seek to address their grievances and fulfill their aspirations.

Goodenow revisited Southern Progressivism three years later in “Paradox in Progressive Educational Reform: The South and the Education of Blacks in the Depression Years.”  Goodenow argued that Southern Progressivism was concentrated on “modernization while concurrently maintaining fundamentally racist patters that themselves were contradictory to much Progressive ideology.”  The main programmatic efforts of Southern Progressives addressed standardized curriculum, scientific management, teacher professionalization, and centralized state control.  Within these programs “tolerance” was often used as a rhetoric for segregation and social control.  Blacks were to be trained “for loyalty, essentially menial tasks, and continued segregation.”  Goodenow condemned much of the Progressive program and its democratic rhetoric as “[Booker T.] Washington’s accommodationism in modern garb.”  The PEA as an organization generally avoided the race issue, but several of its members confronted radical discrimination either directly (Counts, Dewey, Mabel Carney, and Buell Gallagher) or in more oblique ways (Kilpatrick). 

Goodenow also claimed that “historians of Progressivism have totally ignored” the literature of black Progressives like W. A. Robinson, Doxey Wilkerson, Alain Locke, Charles Johnson, and Horace Mann Bond.[cxli]  Some black Progressives used Progressive rhetoric and methods for consciousness raising and social change.  Others, like Bond, argued that Progressive educational reform was futile unless the institutional structure of segregation and racism was attacked: “Let us confess that the schools have never built a new social order, but have always in all times in all lands been the instruments through which social forces were perpetuated.”  In a racist society ruled by racist “social forces,” Bond argued, all educational reform, whatever the rhetoric, would be structured in favor of whites.  In summary, Goodenow condemned Progressivism in the South as a form of “social control,” while he praised it in its role of offering “opportunity to create a more democratic social conscience among whites and a heightened demand for justice among blacks.”  He also praised black Progressives like Bond who criticized and exposed the paradoxes of Progressivism by “testing its democratic ideology against real conditions of oppression.”     

By 1992 the debate on Progressive education had come full circle and Mustafa Emirbayer was basically fleshing out and expanding Lawrence Cremin’s original position.  In “Beyond Structuralism and Voluntarism: The Politics and Discourse of Progressive School Reform, 1890 – 1930”[cxlii] Emirbayer started with Cremin’s landmark conception of the Progressive education as “the educational phase of American Progressivism writ large,” and re-proposed a monolithic interpretation on this movement.  He seemingly defined educational Progressives in a very general way: “inspired by Dewey’s vision, a wide range of educators, parents, and community leaders came together during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in an impassioned crusade to transform American public schooling.”  With this definition he overlooked or ignored pluralistic arguments that denied a monolithic movement and, despite his claim for an empirical foundation, his sociological and political science framework drive an overly deterministic conception that often resulted in superficial and simplistic analysis.[cxliii]  He also based his conceptual framework on one historical context, Boston, and claimed that “school reform unfolded in not dissimilar ways in many other school systems across the county,” although he does admit that his “generalizations” do not “extend as readily to the South.”  Despite these serious failings, his overall analytical framework is intriguing and is very similar to the overall conclusion that I will be drawing at the end of this essay, so his argument merits a closer look.

Emirbayer put forth a conception of Progressivism as “discursive acts[cxliv] by state-building elites,” and he situated his concept within a critical synthesis of two general trends that he found “inadequate.”  He critiqued the strengths and weaknesses of both the school of “structuralist” analysis (Bowles and Gintis, Katz, Nasaw, and Peterson) and also the school of “cultural” analysis (Cremin, Kaestle, Tyack and Hansot).  He argued that structural analysis over-determined institutional power at the expense of human actors, it failed to account for the historical timing of Progressive reforms, and it neglected the importance of cultural factors.  He also argued that cultural analysis tended to “err in the direction of one-sided voluntarism” and ignore “objective constraints on voluntaristic action.” 

Emirbayer broke the Progressive education movement down into three contexts: curricular and pedagogical reforms at the local and national levels; local initiatives to reform the political and administrative structure of schools; and the professionalization of teaching and administrative, including organizational building.  He claimed that “each of these diverse streams of educational Progressivism manifests its own distinctive rhythm and trajectory.  But we can nonetheless group them all together under a common banner because…they all shared a common, unifying discourse, a similar set of concerns expressed in the ideals and images of civic republicanism, Protestant millennialism and liberal individualism.”  Progressives used very influential “cultural discourses” to unite disparate groups into a “broad-based coalition” to achieve the “larger goal” of creating “a new moral basis for American society.”  Emirbayer noted that Progressive education reforms “long outlasted” other reform movements of the Progressive era because of a unique “agenda.”  Progressive education debates represented discursive “struggles” of “oppositional and dominant groups” that battled over different visions and legitimations of the “sacred center” of the “public sphere.”  Both “administrative” and “pedagogical” Progressives were “driven by” a “state-building ideology,” which infused their moral crusade for a corporate welfare state that they envisioned would unite a fragmented urban-industrial republic.  Progressive educators and administrators were working towards a “new moral order” to check the “corruption” and “decay” of older social institutions so as to preserve and consecrate some type of “normative order” at the “sacred center” of American society:

“In their optimistic view, educational reform would help to redeem commonly shared American values and bring ever closer to reality the new ‘democratic’ society that was the true American destiny…As ‘the educational phase of American Progressivism writ large,’ the discourse of the Progressive school reformers embodied both the ‘social control’ dimension so typical of Progressive rhetoric in general, and its more hopeful and millennialist aspiration to a new ‘national community’…school reformers envisioned a generalized Christian spirituality as the basis for an ‘intentionally progressive’ democracy striving toward ever ‘more perfect union.’”

The actualization of the Progressive educational reform was often an “Americanization” program of “socialization” intended for both native and immigrant students.  The socialization process of the curriculum also included differentiation and tracking so as reinforce class-based structures of the American economy.  The end result of these reforms was “often profoundly undemocratic” and “culturally oppressive.  Emirbayer gave Progressive educational reformers credit for being successful in “forging a broad-based coalition” around their distinctive “vision,” which far outlasted all other Progressive reform initiatives and helped usher in a measure of “social stability” over the course of the 20th century.

Before we conclude this essay, we will look at two recent articles that have placed Progressive education within an international context and therefore complicate any conceptual usage of the term.  Marjorie Lamberti studied Progressive education in Imperial Germany at the turn of the century in “Radical Schoolteachers and the Origins of the Progressive Education Movement in Germany, 1900-1914.”[cxlv]  Lamberti chronicles the rise of the neue Padagogik (new pedagogy) and the Arbeitsschule (child-centered school) through the efforts of two predominant strains of Progressive reformers in Germany: radical reformers in Bremen and Hamburg, and more moderate Progressives in Saxony.  Both schools of thought combined a critique of religious instruction in the schools (they wanted it more in line with Modernist scholarship, but not eliminated – although some of the radicals wanted it eliminated) and they put forward a broader critique of teaching practices that were teacher centered, fact oriented, and not in line with the new research in psychology.  These Progressives drew upon German strains of Progressive pedagogy, German culture, and the new research in psychology at German universities, but several influential leaders had also been influenced by John Dewey’s work, especially The School and Society (1899).  The more moderate and majority of German Progressives focused on child centered and learning-by-doing pedagogy that tailored curriculum and instruction to the developmental and psychological needs of the child, while also increasing the professionalization and autonomy of teachers as child development experts.  Although Progressives represented a minority of German teachers, they had a deep impact on the profession and were able to convince the German Teachers’ Association to adopt the “new pedagogy” during the national congress in May 1912, whereby active-learning was added to this organizations program of reform.  This was seven years before the American Progressive Education Association was even founded.  

Jurgen Herbst reviewed the English translation of a German handbook, which centered on the international context of Progressive education.[cxlvi]  The book lacked a clear focus and covered several somewhat successful European Progressive educators and educational movements as well as some less successful attempts in other parts of the globe.  In pondering the international aspect of Progressive education and the editor’s conceptual befuddlement, Herbst rhetorically raised the question of “how far we want to extend the circle that includes activities we might want to classify under progressive education.”  “Are there no viable criteria of inclusion and exclusion?  Does everything fit?”  Herbst analyzed this question by way of a chapter on the development of progressive education in Europe by Jurgen Oelkers.  Herbst summarized that ever since the Reformation “academic institutions were run by governmental authorities in the interest and for the benefit of the state,” and thus European Reformpadagogik had existed alongside the state in “symbiotic relationship” as a “continuous structure” of counter-pedagogical practice stressing “the individualistic spirit” in “antagonistic” relation with the standardization of nationalism.  This suggests that since the Reformation Progressive education has been a social institution that has vied with nationalists over competing visions of the public sphere contained within the centralized organization of the state.  In light of this conceptualization Herbst asked, “it may well be time now to ask whether there is such a thing as a theory of progressive education and, if there is, whether we should begin to debate and define it.”

To conclude this discussion of Progressive education it would be helpful to first restate the conclusions of the last chapter.  It is clear that there were many reformist groups of various political and ideological stripes at the turn of the 20th century, of which Progressivism was but one example.  As a culturally homogeneous and economically secure social class (although uneasy in their security), Progressive reformers had the ability, education, and socio-economic resources to create many diverse voluntary organizations, including educational organizations, which they used to further various social, economic, political, and cultural causes.  Progressives were animated on the whole by a Republican-Populist-Protestant infused ideological orientation that often blended capitalist, scientific, and professional methods, all under a politicized and racialized banner of WASP “Americanism.”

Progressives sought many types of social change and aligned themselves with various other ideological groups to achieve reform coalitions on specific issues and initiatives, but they were primarily concerned with devising a clear and efficient order to harness modernity and industrialization under the tri-partite control of 1) a regulatory State integrated with 2) WASP civic associations and business corporations, and directed by 3) a technocratic elite.  “Americanization” as a nationalistic and cultural identity was the new order the Progressives sought.

The Progressive educational “movement,” to the extent that one can call it a movement outside of the organizational activities of PEA members and their associates, was most explicitly a general educational trend towards a more humane and child centered pedagogy often couched in the language of socialization and democracy – a general educational trend that was spreading across Europe as well.  But Progressive education in the U.S. was also a cultural movement that sought to define a WASP America in its own ideology[cxlvii] and interests and, thereby, to socialize and acculturate American minorities into the dominant Anglo culture (to the extent that different minority groups were deemed worthy of acculturation in specific geographical contexts).  Many minorities were deliberately excluded from Americanization or were offered inclusion on very demeaning, second-class terms.  However, more liberal and radical strands of the Progressive movement, especially within its educational manifestations, articulated a more inclusive, community oriented, democratic, tolerant, and multicultural dimension to the Americanization program. 

Although often in paternalistic, class-based, and racist language, these more liberal rhetorics of Americanization offered up democratic ideals that inspired minority populations to challenge the rhetorical Progressive platitudes of freedom, equality, and justice against the tarnished realities of the status quo.  And arguably as minority populations mobilized, minority leaderships organized, and civil demonstrations multiplied, the more liberal Progressives began to modify their conceptions of the WASP Americanization program and replace it with a more inclusive and multicultural conception – so much so that over the course of the 20th century the liberal state’s executive, legislative, and judicial branches would actually articulate and consecrate the civil rights of all Americans for the first time in the nation’s history.  Of course the more liberal Progressive rhetoric and the rising mobilization of minorities was countered and contested by a more conservative majority, and thus ensued over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st century a struggle – a cultural war – not only for the American paideia, but for the very meaning and “sacred center” of America.  The Progressive Americanization movement is an unfinished project that defines the parameters of the 21st century, which as I write is still the outline of a contested battlefield, and education, as always, is at the center of the political struggle to define the cultural conception of a nation.  At the heart of the conflict is a WASP culture that is loosing control – loosing the ability to exclusively define and delineate the moral order that is supposed to unite a nation.  The roots of this conflict lie at the foundation of the Progressive era.  The early 20th century Progressive movement, to the extent that there was a unified movement, embraced many offensive strategies to protect and preserve their WASP culture: discrimination, segregation, centralization, corporatization, and above all else public and private programs of “Americanization.”          

Endnotes

[i] John, R. Commons, “Progressive Individualism,” American Magazine of Civics, 6 (June 1895), 561-74.  Albion Small, “The Meaning of the Social Movement,” American Journal of Sociology, 3 (Nov. 1897), 340-54. 

[ii] Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (Dec 1982), 113-132.  Rodgers’ discussion of the origins of the term can be found in footnote 1.

[iii] John D. Buenker, “Rejoinders,” in Progressivism (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company, Inc, 1977), 113.

[iv] For a good, concise historiography of Progressivism up to the 1970s see William G. Anderson, “Progressivism: An Historiographical Essay,” The History Teacher 6 (May, 1973), 427-52.

[v] Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 5.

[vi] Ibid.  3, 10-14, 23-59, 133.

[vii] A “status revolution” is perhaps Hofstadter’s most contentious argument and it has been widely criticized by later historians of the period.  Buenker, Burnham & Crunden (1977); Link & McCormick (1983); Chambers II (2000).

[viii] Ibid.  5-6, 8-9, 11, 15-17, 19, 21, 135, 149, 152, 163-64, 182, 185-87, 196, 203, 206 211-12, 216, 288-301.  These pages contain Hofstadter’s major descriptions of Progressivism, Progressives, and the Progressive Movement.  Hofstadter quotes “evangelistic psychology” from Fredric C. Howe’s The Confessions of a Reformer (1925).

[ix] Robert H. Wiebe, The Search For Order, 1877 – 1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 112-13, 128-29, 154-56, 161-68, 170, 174, 181, 198-99.

[x] James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State: 1900-1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).

[xi] Weinstein argued that socialism was the “only serious ideological alternative to [the] politics of social responsibility” used by progressive and corporate coalitions, although he criticized the socialist tendency to place faith in the regulatory state without a full understanding of its corporate capitalist backers (117, 132).

[xii] Ibid., ix-xiii, 33, 58, 61, 143, 212, 252.

[xiii] Peter Filene, “An Obituary for ‘The Progressive Movement,’” American Quarterly 22 (1970): 20-34;  John D. Buenker, John C. Burnham, and Robert M. Crunden, “Introduction,” In Progressivism (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company, Inc., 1977), iv-viii.

[xiv] John D. Buenker, John C. Burnham, and Robert M. Crunden, Progressivism (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company, Inc., 1977).

[xv] John C. Burnham, “Essay,” in Progressivism (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company, Inc, 1977), 3-29.

[xvi] Burnham is quoting Clyde Griffen, “The Progressive Ethos,” in The Development of an American Culture, eds. Stanley Coben and Lorman Ratner (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970): 120-149.

[xvii] Burnham argued against claims linking progressivism to welfare statism: “Equating the extension of governmental power for social justice purposes, or what came to be called welfare statism, to the spirit of progressivism is therefore an error.  It is true that many Americans admired German cameralism and socialism.  And many Americans did come to think that the neutral state would have to intervene more actively to maintain traditional liberty and freedom in society and so become a service state.  But to portray the attitudes of progressives toward political activity and power as anything beyond ambivalence is to distort the movement beyond recognition” (15).

[xviii] Robert M. Crunden, “Essay,” in Progressivism (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company, Inc, 1977), 71-103.

[xix] Crunden summarized Erikson’s theory in this way: “Erikson has demonstrated suggestively how crises in childhood and youth can combine especially with religious milieus to produce effective political movements, and to create moral frames of reference in which certain values and reactions seem to be taken for granted.  He has also placed his considerable prestige behind the contention that great leaders articulate and find ways of resolving the important psychological conflicts in the culture of their time” (72).  Crunden draws from Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York, 1950, 1963); Young Man Luther (New York, 1958); Ghandi’s Truth (New York, 1969).  See also Robert M. Crunden, “Freud, Erikson and the Historian: A Bibliographical Survey,” Canadian Review of American Studies vol. 4, no. 1 (Spring, 1973): 48-64.

[xx] Fredric C. Howe, The Confessions of A Reformer (1925; reprint, Chicago, 1967), 12-17.  Crunden, “Essay,” Progressivism, 98-99.

[xxi] Robert M. Crunden, Ministers of Reform: The Progressives’ Achievement in American Civilization, 1889 – 1920 (1982; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), ix-x, 39-40, 64-68,164, 274-277.

[xxii] John D. Buenker, “Essay,” in Progressivism (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company, Inc, 1977), 31-69.

[xxiii] Buenker wrote: “In a larger sense, Americans turned to politics because it was the only forum the nation possessed for ameliorating the conditions wrought by industrialization, immigration, and urbanization and for accommodating the competing demands of various economic, ethnic, and geographic groups…In a highly competitive society there was not a real sense of community to sustain concern for the less fortunate.  For better or worse, only politics provided an arena where conflicting groups could face each other under established ground rules and attempt to resolve their differences.  The political system, alone of America’s institutions, was based upon the existence of pluralism and diversity; it was constructed by compromise and specially designed to provide a means of accommodating conflicting interests” (46-47).

[xxiv] Ibid., 31-40, 43, 56, 59 63.

[xxv] Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (Dec 1982), 113-132.

[xxvi] Rogers argued that Progressives did not “share a common creed or a string of common values,” but instead shared a “cluster of ideas” and “three distinct social languages.”  These languages were a “rhetoric of antimonopolism,” “an emphasis on social bonds and the social nature of human beings,” and “the language of social efficiency.”  Rodgers said the Progressives were great “users” of ideas as a “set of tools” with which they made “progressive social thought distinct and volatile” as they brought together all three of the reformist languages together into a powerful and “dynamic” “constellation” “from which they drew their energies and their sense of social ills, and within which they found their solutions” (122-27).   

[xxvii] Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick, Progressivism (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1983), 1-10, 21-22, 72, 79, 84, 96-104.

[xxviii] Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877 – 1919 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987).

[xxix] Ibid., xii-xiii, xix, xxiv, xl, xliii, 279-80.

[xxx] Ibid., xxviii, 8, 136, 258, 268.

[xxxi] Ibid., 70-71, 231-52.

[xxxii] Ibid., Ch 5 & 7.

[xxxiii] John D. Buenker, “Sovereign Individuals and Organic Networks: Political Cultures in Conflict During the Progressive Era,” American Quarterly 40 (Jun, 1988), 187-204.

[xxxiv] Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), 1-13, 30-31, 62, 71-73, 105, 128-38, 163-65, 370, 394.

[xxxv] Chambers noted in his bibliography that he was not able to read Dawley’s Struggles for Justice in researching the first edition of his book.  I would argue that Dawley has presented one of the clearest and most comprehensive treatments of the era and the subject of Progressivism to date.

[xxxvi] John Whiteclay Chambers II, The Tyranny of Change: American in the Progressive Era, 1890 – 1920 (1992; reprint, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), xi-xiii, 132-47, 150-51, 157, 169-71.  Chambers summed up nicely the “meaning of the Progressive Era:” “In the Progressive Era, large numbers of Americans concluded that the problems accompanying industrialization meant that they could no longer rely solely on Providence or evolution for automatic progress.  They lost their faith in the long-held utilitarian concept of a natural harmony of self-interests and in the functioning of a self-regulating society…With optimism and the sense of power that came from developments in science, technology, and organizational theory, the new interventionists decided that it was necessary to modify the concept of unrestricted individualism and the marketplace.  They thought that intervention and intelligent direction could ensure continued growth and progress that would be consistent with the ideal of an efficient and liberal democratic society…Interventionists created new mechanisms for dealing with the problems caused by blind social forces or powerful, self-interested individuals or groups…interventionists employed organization and intervention as tools for achieving their goals and imposing conscious direction on society…The dominant development of the era was the emergence of an interventionist mood on a national scale.  The need for some kind of purposeful, collective intervention…the organization of economic and social power.  The local, informal group so characteristic of small-town and agrarian society was superseded as the basic framework of American life by immensely larger, hierarchically structured formal organizations…the organizational or bureaucratic revolution….Although people at all levels of society sought to influence the forces affecting their lives, particularly in the immediate environment in which they lived, the poor and the unorganized had little or no influence in the national political system” (275-82).

[xxxvii] William Deverell, “The Varieties of Progressive Experience,” California Progressivism Revisited, ed. William Deverell and Tom Sitton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994): 1-11.

[xxxviii] Gary Gerstle, “The Protean Character of American Liberalism,” The American Historical Review 99:4 (Oct 1994): 1043-1073.

[xxxix] Richard L. McCormick, “Public Life in Industrial America, 1877 – 1917” in The New American History, ed. Eric Foner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 107-132.

[xl] In the same volume, Alan Brinkley described the “broad conflict” of the time as the “diverse” responses of various groups that coalesced into a “broad pattern of protest,” whereby, “’localistic’ people were struggling to preserve control of both the economic and the cultural institutions that governed their lives in the face of encroachments from the modern, bureaucratic order” (137-40).  Alan Brinkley, “Prosperity, Depression, and War, 1920 – 1945,” in The New American History, ed. Eric Foner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 133-158.

[xli] McCormick noted that the “concept” of “Progressivism” “still dominates the interpretive literature on the early twentieth-century United States” and that for better or worse the “concept is inescapably embedded in the language of contemporaries and the writings of historians.”  While there were “varied, fervent efforts to solve the problems caused by urbanization and industrialization,” the efforts of Progressives were distinctly powerful and long lasting.  Progressives were largely native born, urban, middle and upper middle class, and rooted in evangelical Protestantism.  They sought to use the social sciences to “eradicate social conflicts” and also to temper the excesses of capitalism (121-22).

[xlii] Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 367-401.  The Economist noted in 2005 that “voluntary associations have been the secret ingredient of American social dynamism since the country’s foundation…civic associations made Americans better informed, safer, richer and better able to govern themselves and create a just and stable society.”  This publication commented on Putnam’s thesis and argued for new signs of civic participation in the U.S.  “The Glue of Society: Americans are Joining Clubs Again,” in A Survey of America, The Economist, 16 July. 2005, 13-17.

[xliii] Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870 – 1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

[xliv] McGerr described the “progressive” ideology as part of the “middle-class alienation from working-class and upper-class culture.”  He wrote, “Progressivism was the way in which these Victorian men and women came to answer the basic questions of human life that have confronted all people in all times and places: What is the nature of the individual?  What is the relationship between the individual and society?  What are the proper roles of men, women, and the family?  What is the place of work and pleasure in human life?”  The answers to these questions “added up to a novel set of guiding values, a new ideology for the middle class: Victorianism gave way to progressivism” – “Rethinking domesticity, rejecting individualism, reconsidering work and pleasure, and redesigning the body” (343 footnote 73, xiv, 42, 64).

[xlv] Ibid., xiii-xvi, 42, 64, 67-68,

[xlvi] Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 79, 33.  MacLean argued that one “common core goal” of the Klan was “securing the power of the white petite bourgeoisie in the face of challenges stemming from modern industrial capitalism.  The Klan sought to deny political rights to those whom it perceived as threats to that power” (141).  MacLean also made it very clear that “extreme conditions” can very easily lead to a “reactionary politics:” “Under conditions of economic uncertainty, sharply contested social relations, and political impasse, assumptions about class, race, gender, and state power so ordinary as to appear ‘common sense’ to most WASP Americans could be refashioned and harnessed to the building of a virulent reactionary politics able to mobilize millions” (186).

[xlvii] Ibid., 10-11, 52-74.

[xlviii] Ibid., 149-73.  MacLean wrote: “Vigilante Violence was the concentrated expression of that culture, of the brutal determination to maintain inherited hierarchies of race, class, and gender that Klansmen sought to conceal with a mask of chivalry” (173).

[xlix] Ibid., 125-48, 166-67; David Roediger, “Whiteness and Ethnicity in the History of ‘White Ethnics’ in the United States,” in Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (London: Verso, 1994),189.  See also Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877 – 1919 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987): Ch 12.

[l] C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 90-93; Anonymous Klansmen quoted in MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry, 132-34, 161; Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, 178; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (1955; reprint, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998) 170-71, 173, 175-77; Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877 – 1919, Ibid; McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 182-218; Dawley, Struggles for Justice, 105-38, 254-94; McCormick, “Public Life in Industrial America,” 124-26; Brinkley, “Prosperity, Depression, and War,” 139-40.

[li] C. Vann Woodward noted in 1954 the related platforms of “Negrophobia and progressivism” in the South: “The omission of the South from the annals of the progressive movement has been one of the glaring oversights of American historians…The blind spot in the Southern progressive record – as, for that matter, in the national movement – was the Negro, for the whole movement in the South coincided paradoxically with the crest of the wave of racism…the typical progressive reformer rode to power in the South on a disfranchising or white-supremacy movement.” The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Ibid., 90-91. 

[lii] McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 216-17.

[liii] David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 70.

[liv] Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), 185.  Foner pointed out many criticisms of the “underside of the Progressives’ outlook,” like how “their talk of reconstructing society masked a set of managerial attitudes in which democratic values were ‘subordinated to technique.’”  He also pointed out that because of Progressive’s homogenized cultural and racial assumptions, they were “ill-prepared to develop a coherent defense of minority rights against majority or governmental tyranny” (176, 78).

[lv] Daniel T. Rodgers, “An Age of Social Politics,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 250-73.

[lvi] Michael Kazin argued, “On the national level, it would be hard to disentangle the history of the Left from the history of American reform.”  He also quoted Will Herberg who wrote, “It would not be too much to say that socialist agitation and propaganda have constituted the single most influential factor in the advance of American social reform.  Untiring socialist criticism of existing conditions have invariably served as the main force in opening the way for reform legislation.”  Michael Kazin, “The Agony and Romance of the American Left,” The American Historical Review, 100 (Dec 1995): 1510; Will Herberg, “American Marxist Political Theory,” Socialism and American Life, 1, Donald Drew Egbert and Stow Persons, eds. (Princeton, N.J., 1952): 521.

[lvii] Foner, The Story of American Freedom, Ibid., 141.

[lviii] Gary Gerstle, “Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans,” The Journal of American History 84:2 (Sept 1997): 530.

[lix] Robert Wiebe, “Framing U.S. History: Democracy, Nationalism, and Socialism,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 236-49.

[lx] Daniel T. Rodgers, “An Age of Social Politics,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 250-73.

[lxi] Michael Kazin argued, “On the national level, it would be hard to disentangle the history of the Left from the history of American reform.”  He also quoted Will Herberg who wrote, “It would not be too much to say that socialist agitation and propaganda have constituted the single most influential factor in the advance of American social reform.  Untiring socialist criticism of existing conditions have invariably served as the main force in opening the way for reform legislation.”  Michael Kazin, “The Agony and Romance of the American Left,” The American Historical Review, 100 (Dec 1995): 1510; Will Herberg, “American Marxist Political Theory,” Socialism and American Life, 1, Donald Drew Egbert and Stow Persons, eds. (Princeton, N.J., 1952): 521.

[lxii] Foner, The Story of American Freedom, Ibid., 141.

[lxiii] Gary Gerstle, “Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans,” The Journal of American History 84:2 (Sept 1997): 530.

[lxiv] Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 79, 33.  MacLean argued that one “common core goal” of the Klan was “securing the power of the white petite bourgeoisie in the face of challenges stemming from modern industrial capitalism.  The Klan sought to deny political rights to those whom it perceived as threats to that power” (141).  MacLean also made it very clear that “extreme conditions” can very easily lead to a “reactionary politics:” “Under conditions of economic uncertainty, sharply contested social relations, and political impasse, assumptions about class, race, gender, and state power so ordinary as to appear ‘common sense’ to most WASP Americans could be refashioned and harnessed to the building of a virulent reactionary politics able to mobilize millions” (186).

[lxv] Ibid., 10-11, 52-74.  Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage Books, 1955).

[lxvi] Ibid., 149-73.  MacLean wrote: “Vigilante Violence was the concentrated expression of that culture, of the brutal determination to maintain inherited hierarchies of race, class, and gender that Klansmen sought to conceal with a mask of chivalry” (173).

[lxvii] Ibid., 125-48, 166-67; David Roediger, “Whiteness and Ethnicity in the History of ‘White Ethnics’ in the United States,” in Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (London: Verso, 1994),189.  See also Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877 – 1919 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987): Ch 12.

[lxviii] C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 90-93; Anonymous Klansmen quoted in MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry, 132-34, 161; Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, 178; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (1955; reprint, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998) 170-71, 173, 175-77; Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877 – 1919, Ibid; McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 182-218; Dawley, Struggles for Justice, 105-38, 254-94; McCormick, “Public Life in Industrial America,” 124-26; Brinkley, “Prosperity, Depression, and War,” 139-40.

[lxix] C. Vann Woodward noted in 1954 the related platforms of “Negrophobia and progressivism” in the South: “The omission of the South from the annals of the progressive movement has been one of the glaring oversights of American historians…The blind spot in the Southern progressive record – as, for that matter, in the national movement – was the Negro, for the whole movement in the South coincided paradoxically with the crest of the wave of racism…the typical progressive reformer rode to power in the South on a disfranchising or white-supremacy movement.” The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Ibid., 90-91. 

[lxx] McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 216-17.

[lxxi] David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 70.

[lxxii] Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), 185.  Foner pointed out many criticisms of the “underside of the Progressives’ outlook,” like how “their talk of reconstructing society masked a set of managerial attitudes in which democratic values were ‘subordinated to technique.’”  He also pointed out that because of Progressive’s homogenized cultural and racial assumptions, they were “ill-prepared to develop a coherent defense of minority rights against majority or governmental tyranny” (176, 78).

[lxxiii] Robert Wiebe, “Framing U.S. History: Democracy, Nationalism, and Socialism,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 236-49.

[lxxiv] Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877 – 1919, Ibid., Ch 5 & 7.  See also: George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).

[lxxv] Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877 – 1919, Ibid., xxviii, 8, 136, 258, 268.

[lxxvi] Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001): 4-9, 43, 46-51, 71.

[lxxvii] Ibid., 53-59, 72, 93-94.

[lxxviii] John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (1955; reprint, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998): 196, 200, 204-05.

[lxxix] Ibid., 206-23.

[lxxx] Ibid., 215-16, 222-33.

[lxxxi] Gary Gerstle, “The Protean Character of American Liberalism,” The American Historical Review 99:4 (Oct 1994): 1043-1073.

[lxxxii] Noah Pickus, True Faith and Allegiance: Immigration and American Civic Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005): 64-65, 71-74; Edward George Hartmann, The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant (1948; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1967); John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (1955; reprint, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Robert A. Carlson, “Americanization as an Early Twentieth-Century Adult Education Movement,” History of Education Quarterly 10:4 (Winter 1970): 440-64.

[lxxxiii] Noah Pickus, True Faith and Allegiance: Immigration and American Civic Nationalism, Ibid, 64-65, 73-84 (left-leaning Progressives), 85- 123 (right-leaning Progressives); Jonathan Hansen, “True Americanism: Progressive Era Intellectuals and the Problem of Liberal Nationalism,” In Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal, Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin, eds. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006): 73-89.

[lxxxiv] Ibid., 90-123, 220 (footnote 59).

[lxxxv] Ibid., 120-23.

[lxxxvi] Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876 – 1957 (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 8-14; Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1783 – 1876 (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1980), 133-75; Jonathan Messerli, Horace Mann: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972).

[lxxxvii] Cremin, The Transformation of the School, 14-31; Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876 – 1980 (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1988), 158-65.  In 1871 William Torrey Harris wrote to the Board of Directors of the St. Louis Public Schools: “The spirit of American institutions is to be looked for in the public schools to a greater degree than anywhere else…If the rising generation does not grow up with democratic principles, the fault will lie in the system of popular education.”

[lxxxviii] Cremin, The Transformation of the School, 355-58; Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958, 3rd ed (1986; reprint, New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004): 1-25.

[lxxxix] John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1938); Boyd Bode, Education at the Crossroads (New York: Newson, 1938).

[xc] There were several early histories of Progressive education that were produced while the movement was still widely influential, but they were written primarily by Progressive educators who had an obvious interest in writing the history of their own cause.  The first was Edward H. Reisner’s “What is Progressive Education?” in Teachers College Record (1933-4) and then Merle Curti’s The Social Ideas of American Educators (1935).  A few years later R. Freeman Butts published The College Charts Its Course (1939).  Robert Holmes Beck wrote the first dissertation on Progressive education at Yale University in 1941, “American Progressive Education, 1875 – 1930.”  The last early history of the movement written by a partisan was Harold Rugg’s Foundations for American Education (1947).  C.A. Bowers reported in 1969 that “most of the sources that deal with Progressive education are books and articles written by professors of education.  Unfortunately, they proved little help in determining how widely their contents were accepted among classroom teachers.”  Bowers stated the “desirability” of a study on “how much influence the theoreticians actually had on the practitioners in the classroom.”  The Progressive Educator and the Depression: The Radical Years (New York: Random House, 1969), x.

[xci] Cremin, The Transformation of the School, 355-58; Larry Cuban, How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890 – 1980 (New York: Longman, 1993), 75; Bowers, The Progressive Educator and the Depression, 11;  David Tyack, Robert Lowe, and Elisabeth Hansot, Public Schools in Hard Times: The Great Depression and Recent Years (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984): 152, 158.  Tyack et. al. also note: “To the degree that Progressive educators succeeded in retaining old programs or installing new ones, they had to work within severe fiscal constraints in most districts.  And the success of publicized reforms probably obscured the conservatism of the great mass of American public schools.”

[xcii] David Tyack, Robert Lowe, and Elisabeth Hansot have succinctly criticized the Social Reconstructionist agenda: “The reconstructionists challenged the existing order by a powerful alternative vision of America, but their strategy seemed naïve to many radicals, their goal seemed dangerous to many conservatives, and their grasp of educational realities seemed tenuous to many fellow school people.  Socialism was the road not taken.” Public Schools in Hard Times: The Great Depression and Recent Years, 47-48.

[xciii] Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession, 332, 370.  Novick used the term “counterprogressive” to characterize primarily the change of interpretive framework within the historical community, which was reacting against the Progressive historiography of Charles Beard and Carl Becker.  But he also extended its use to include the reaction against Progressive educationalists like John Dewey: “By the 1950s counterprogressivism extended to the conviction that John Dewey had had a pernicious influence on American education, and that to combat ‘populist’ anti-intellectualism, one had to return to a more traditional curriculum, and restore the authority of academic elites.”  C. A. Bowers noted, “A heavy barrage of criticism was being leveled at Progressive education by an awakened and highly concerned public.  Dissatisfaction with Progressive education had been growing among interested and vocal members of the American public since the early forties, but it was not until 1949 that they began a direct assault on the philosophy and practice of Progressive schools.  The attack was so sweeping that little escaped condemnation.”  The Progressive Educator and the Depression, 242. 

[xciv] Ibid., 347-53; Daniel Tanner, Crusade for Democracy: Progressive Education at the Crossroads (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991).  C. A. Bowers, The Progressive Educator and the Depression, 242.  Bowers noted: “The idea that the schools should be used to overcome the problems of racial integration, a high divorce rate, and chronic poverty, as well as to help American beat the Russians to the moon indicates that at least part of the social reconstructionist philosophy of education has become accepted as the ‘conventional wisdom’ of our society” (253).

[xcv] Thomas Woody earned his PhD in the History of Education in 1918 at Teachers College and went on to become an early and prolific writer of educational history.  He wrote many books on the history of education, both European and American.  James Mulhern, “Perspectives,” History of Education Quarterly 1 (June 1961): 1-4.

[xcvi] Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

[xcvii] Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, “Does History Matter in Education Research? A Brief for the Humanities in an Age of Science,” Harvard Educational Review 75 (Spring, 2005), 9-24. 

[xcviii] The History of Education Society transformed an earlier publication, History of Education Journal, which was founded in 1951 under the editorship of Claude Eggertson, into a more academic organ with the launching of History of Education Quarterly in 1961 under the editorship of Ryland W. Crary at the University of Pittsburgh.

[xcix] For historiographical debate see Novick, That Noble Dream; Robert Harrison, “The ‘new social history’ in America” in Making History: An Introduction to the History and Practices of a Discipline, ed. Peter Lambert and Phillipp Schofield (London: Routledge, 2004): 109-20; Peter Charles Hoffer, “Part I: Facts and Fictions” in Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud – American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004): 11-130; Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (1997; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 2000).  For some specific mention of this debate within educational historiography see Diane Ravitch, The Revisionists Revised: A Critique of the Radical Attack on the Schools (New York: Basic Books, 1978); Jeffrey E. Mirel, “Introduction” in William J. Reese, Power and the Promise of School Reform: Grassroots Movements During the Progressive Era (1986; reprint, New York: Teachers College Press, 2002): ix-xvi; Herbert M. Kliebard, “Afterword: The Search for Meaning in Progressive Education: Curriculum Conflict in the Context of Status Politics” in The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893 – 1958, 3rd ed (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004).

[c] C.A. Bowers called Cremin’s book “the most important history of the Progressive education movement, particularly in its early phases.”  The Progressive Educator and the Depression, 259.  Hebert M. Kliebard argued, “Cremin succeeded in establishing history of education as an integral part of cultural and social history, and the writing of history of education has never really been the same since his book appeared.”  The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 272.  On the 30th anniversary of the work, John L. Rury argued that the book’s “appearance did much to make educational history a credible subfield of American history, and one open to new research and interpretation.” “Transformation in Perspective: Lawrence Cremin’s Transformation of the School,” History of Education Quarterly 31 (Spring 1991): 66-76.

[ci] It won the Bancroft Prize in American History in 1962.

[cii] Cremin,  The Transformation of the School, viii-x, 88-89.

[ciii] Ibid., 240-45.

[civ] Ibid., 306-8.

[cv] Ibid., 347-51.

[cvi] The second volume, American History: The National Experience, 1783 – 1876, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1981.

[cvii] Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876 – 1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 10-14, 110, 150, 178, 196, 228, 442-44.  Cremin also used the term “American Victorianism” to describe the Americanization program of “standardizing” culture based on “ethnic, religious, and racial ethnocentrism” so as to “convey its outlook upon the world and thereby enforce its standards and patterns of behavior” (442-44).

[cviii] Cremin quoted Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” Partisan Review (Fall 1958): 494-95.

[cix] Lawrence A. Cremin, “Education as Politics” in Popular Education and Its Discontents (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 85-127.  The three essays in this book were based on lectures given at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1989.

[cx] David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 3-12.

[cxi] Ibid., 19-27.

[cxii] Tyack quoted William T. Harris, St. Louis School Report for 1871, 31-32.

[cxiii] Ibid., 28-43, 60-65, 72-77, 109, 127-131, 146-47.

[cxiv] David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, “From Social Movement to Professional Management: An Inquiry into the Changing Character of Leadership in Public Education,” American Journal of Education 88 (May 1980): 291-319.

[cxv] David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820 – 1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1982).  Tyack and Hansot wrote, “Many people (ourselves included) have become newly aware, thanks to the radical analysis, of ideological frameworks and class interests too much taken for granted.”  They mention in particular Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968).  In summarizing the “radical historians” Tyack and Hansot wrote: “They have sought to demystify public education, to scatter the fog of sentiment that covered harsh realities.  They have argued that its basic structure was hierarchical and elitist, not democratic; that its operation was class-biased, racist, and sexist; that it was imposed by elites, not created democratically by educational statesmen and their allies; that its ideology was suffused with notions of social control, often covert; that tinkering with minor improvements would not set it right; and that, most important, its claim of being able to right the basic inequities of American life was a legend” (9).

[cxvi] Ibid., 5, 17, 21-22, 73-76.

[cxvii] Ibid., 3-8.

[cxviii] Ibid., 106-111, 206, 226.  David Tyack and Thomas Timar reiterate much of this argument in their brief for the National Commission on Governing America’s Schools, “The Invisible Hand of Ideology: Perspectives from the History of School Governance,” Education Commission of the States (Jan 1999): 1-23.

[cxix] David Tyack, Robert Lowe, and Elisabeth Hansot, Public Schools in Hard Times: The Great Depression and Recent Years (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984): 56-57, 91, 150, 162-63, 180, 189-90.

[cxx] C. A. Bowers, The Progressive Educator and the Depression: The Radical Years (New York: Random House, 1969): ix-x, 4-5, 15, 20, 41.  Bowers noted that the editors of The Social Frontier did not agree with Roosevelt’s New Deal plan to implant a welfare state within a capitalistic society.  The plan was to organize teachers and then participate with the labor movement in larger unionizing efforts, while also giving students in the classroom a “labor orientation” towards the issues of the day.  They even warned their readership that there may be violence, in which case, teachers should feel justified that the “onus will fall on the shoulders of those few who cannot gracefully surrender their privileges in the face of a popular decision” (134,140).

[cxxi] Ibid., 48-51, 144, 151, 181, 201-54.

[cxxii]Joel Spring, “Education and Progressivism,” History of Education Quarterly 10 (Spring 1970): 53-71.

[cxxiii] Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893 – 1958, 3rd ed. (1986; reprint, New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004), xiv, xviii-xix, 1-52.

[cxxiv] Herbert M. Kliebard, “Afterword: The Search for Meaning in Progressive Education: Curriculum Conflict in the Context of Status Politics,” in The Struggle for American Curriculum, 1893 – 1958, 3rd ed. (1993; reprint, New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004), 271-92.  Kliebard emphasized his point of educational curriculum being a “battleground:” “Whatever else the curriculum may be in terms of what actually gets taught to children, it is also the arena where ideological armies clash over the status of deeply held convictions…The question of whose cultural and moral values will emerge as dominant…the curriculum in any time and place becomes the site of a battleground where the fight is over whose values and beliefs will achieve the legitimation and the respect that acceptance into the national discourse provides.”

[cxxv] Paul E. Peterson, The Politics of School Reform, 1870-1940 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 4, 15, 22-23, 207.  Peterson nicely summarized the complicated notion of reform in this complex environment: “Reformers’ policies were as often rejected as approved.  When adopted, they were frequently amended; when promulgated, they were not always implemented” (203).

[cxxvi] Peterson conceptual included race and ethnicity under the heading of social “status.”  He explained that although “school politics had become increasingly marked by class conflict in the first decades of this century, questions of race and ethnicity did not instantly disappear.  Especially in the South, race relations remained so significant a concern that class issues were never vigorously articulated:” “ethnic conflicts could interrupt a politics of class” (18-19).  

[cxxvii] Ibid., 6, 8-9, 12, 21-23.

[cxxviii] Ibid., 6, 53-71, 73-75, 92.  Peterson argued that “rather than a long-term pattern of favoritism, we see early discrimination giving way to increasing acceptance of the larger immigrant groups” (91).

[cxxix] Ibid., 95-117.

[cxxx] William J. Reese, “’Partisans of the Proletariat’: The Socialist Working Class and the Milwaukee Schools, 1890 – 1920,” History of Education Quarterly, 21 (Spring 1981): 3-50.

[cxxxi] He went on to write: “But what is missing even in recent historiography is an appreciation of the radical politics and third-party movements which periodically swept many cities in the early 1900s; a recognition of how people from many different social classes and ethnic backgrounds once struggled collectively, if for different reasons and with sometimes contrary results, for reforms easily dismissed by some historians today as examples of ‘social control’; and a sense of how immigrants and the urban poor themselves shaped the social life of the school and the contours of the past” (5).

[cxxxii] Reese argued, “the ‘working class’ has never been a single, monolithic, or static entity.  Since America was populated by individuals with diverse ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds, several working class populations have always existed simultaneously.  It is therefore impossible for a historian to identify a single ‘working class’ influence on education, for none has ever existed…In Milwaukee, the Socialist working class grew by accretion, increased its ideological sophistication over time, and represented diverse, shifting elements of laboring people” (6).

[cxxxiii] Kenneth Teitelbaum and William J. Reese, “American Socialist Pedagogy and Experimentation in the Progressive Era: Te Socialist Sunday School,” History of Education Quarterly 23 (Winter 1983): 429-454.

[cxxxiv] William J. Reese, Power and the Promise of School Reform (1986; reprint, New York: Teachers College Press, 2002), 1-2, 123, 130, 213-14.

[cxxxv] Reese characterized these grassroots reformers as a “multidimensional political movement:” “A variety of motivation, perceptions, personalities, and interests converged in the making of grassroots Progressivism … Grassroots Progressivism, therefore, had its middle-class and feminine as well as working-class and Socialist roots, growing together in the 1890s like entangling vines that crossed but did not always join.  The Social Gospel and Progressive religion added the final stimulus to the growth of municipal reform” (123, 70).

[cxxxvi] Ibid., 9, 70, 80-81, 118, 121-23, 133, 214, 222-226.

[cxxxvii] Horace Mann Bond, “Education in the South,” Journal of Educational Sociology 12 (Jan 1939): 264-74.

[cxxxviii] James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860 – 1935 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 1-2, 279.

[cxxxix] Ibid., 13, 15, 20-21 67, 92, 285.

[cxl] Ronald K. Goodenow, “The Progressive Educator, Race and Ethnicity in the Depression Years: An Overview,” History of Education Quarterly 15 (Winter 1975): 365-94; “The Progressive Educator on Race, Ethnicity, Creativity, and Planning: Harold Rugg in the 1930s,” Review Journal of Philosophy and Social Science 1 (Winter 1977): 105-28; “The Progressive Educator as Radical or Conservative: George S. Counts and Race,” History of Education Quarterly 17 (Winter 1977): 45-57; “Racial and Ethnic Tolerance in John Dewey’s Educational and Social Thought: The Depression Years,” Educational Theory 26 (Winter 1977): 48-64; “The Paradox in Progressive Educational Reform: The South and the Education of Blacks in the Depression Years,” Phylon 39 (March 1978): 49-65; “The Southern Progressive Educator on Race and Pluralism: The Case of William Heard Kilpatrick,” History of Education Quarterly 21 (Summer 1981): 147-70.

[cxli] Historians of the Progressive era and Progressive education began to take more concerted note of ethnic minorities by the 1970s.  David Tyack for one has devoted much space to ethnic minorities, including blacks, within many of his educational histories.  Ronald E. Butchart has traced the rich historiography of African American education, and expertly categorized and analyzed the subject up until the late 1980s.  Ronald E. Butchart, “’Outthinking and Outflanking the Owners of the World”: A Historiography of the African American Struggle for Education,” History of Education Quarterly 28 (Autumn 1988): 333-66.

[cxlii] Mustafa Emirbayer, “Beyond Structuralism and Voluntarism: The Politics and Discourse of Progressive School Reform, 1890 – 1930,” Theory and Society 21 (Oct 1992): 621-64.

[cxliii] Emirbayer often made statements or used the pronoun “they” to refer to “Progressives” and then made generalizations that are highly suspect, given that not all “Progressives” would have agreed with or argued for a particular position.  For instance, he claimed “they proposed the reorganization of classroom instruction so that it would promote each student’s capacities for social interaction and creative problem-solving” (625).  For a more complicated conception of “Progressive” education see Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum.  Since Emirbayer claimed that “educational research has neglected the microscopic domain of curriculum and pedagogy,” it is curious that he did not find, read, or reference Kliebard’s groundbreaking book.  Even the conservative Diane Ravitch referenced Kliebard in her summary book on the subject, Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform (New York: Touchstone, 2000), 33, 54, 529.  The omission of Kliebard is also troubling given the close similarity between Emirbayer’s “struggle” thesis and Kliebard’s conception of curricular “struggle.”

[cxliv] Emirbayer agued that Progressive “discourse” was a “major element behind the transformation of public school systems and of moral and civic education:” “to formulate precisely such a discourse, to refashion old symbols, images, and ideals into a new agenda for redeeming the unfulfilled promise of American education.”  See also Daniel T. Rogers, “In Search of Progressivism.”

[cxlv] Marjorie Lamberti, “Radical Schoolteachers and the Origins of the Progressive Education Movement in Germany, 1900 -1914,” History of Education Quarterly 40 (Spring 2000): 22-48.

[cxlvi] Jurgen Herbst, review of Progressive Education Across the Continents: A Handbook, ed. Hermann Rohrs and Volker Lenhart, History of Education Quarterly 37 (Spring 1997): 45-59.

[cxlvii] Carl F. Kaestle, “Ideology and American Educational History,” History of Education Quarterly 22 (Summer 1982): 123-37.  Kaestle defined the progressive ideology as a “moral culture based on Anglo-American Protestantism, republicanism, and capitalism” that asserted “centralist, assimilationist, and moralistic” values and “cultural preferences.”  He called progressive reformers “hegemonic” because “they were didactic and ethnocentric” and tried to “promote publicly” their cultural value system through public education (128, 130).