At the 2018 Organization of American Historians (OAH) meeting, scholars discussed a textbook proposal for a Mexican American Studies (MAS) high school curriculum approved by the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE). The argument between the MAS supporters and the SBOE centered on the tired battle over whose point of view would prevail in the retelling of American history. In Texas history, this has been a point of contention since the Battle of the Alamo, accurately rendered in John Sayles's 1996 movie, Lone Star, when history teacher Pilar Cruz (Elizabeth Peña) flatly says, “Forget the Alamo.” The OAH panelists, including myself, detailed how the proposed textbook, with over four hundred errors and fixated on American exceptionalism, had the potential not only to derail the MAS curriculum but also to misinform students. Fortunately, the SBOE eventually agreed to nix the textbook. In the midst of our OAH conversation, someone asked why bother with a futile textbook battle? This is where historian Clif Stratton enters: in Education for Empire he cogently demonstrates how seemingly unrelated politics—immigration, imperial power, and school policy—“reciprocally shaped each other in specific local and regional contexts, but also how marginalized communities, parents, and children challenged the forces of imperialism and inequality so central to American public education” (p. 49).
Stratton argues that at the turn of the twentieth century, American public schools inaugurated a hierarchy of “good citizenship” based on frameworks found in textbooks. In history, geography, and civics, textbooks “brought into focus a world in which race and empire were paramount in shaping the contours of national citizenship” (p. 17). These contours, Stratton argues, became an imperative for educators who used these logics to codify school-based practices based on “good citizenship.” Teachers determined students’ potential based on closely aligned perceptions of race, national origin, and US imperial designs. Stratton defines “good citizenship” as a “gradient” or variable category of inequality where an individual's rights and access transmogrify within institutions and across society depending upon their perceived “place.” The paradox of “good citizenship” is a play on a phrase by Waddy Thompson, the textbook author of Primary History of the United States (1913), who “claimed to send [all] students down a singular ‘path of good citizenship’” (p. 3) when, in fact, as Stratton reveals, the opposite was true. “Colonial forms of governance” predominated in American public schools, from the Pacific Rim to the East Coast, from the borderlands to Dixie, despite progressive promises of public education as the great mediator and equalizer of civic, social, and economic opportunity (p. 2).
To demonstrate the significance of “good citizenship,” Stratton focuses on the period between the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1924 National Origins Act to emphasize “how the debates, stakes, and contexts over belonging and exclusion were of central concern to white nationalists, Americanizers, expansionists, and anti-imperialists” (p. 3). He uses these legislative poles to make obvious the imposed order that “native-born whites” sought as an afterthought to the instabilities that American imperialism wrought, such as the blurring “identities of white and nonwhite, native-born and foreign, citizen and subject, patriot and dissident” (p. 7). School officials subsequently used a variety of tools—textbooks, curricula, policy, and politics—to incorporate “good citizenship” practices into course delivery in order to produce student-citizens who could later distinguish and internalize these inequitable paths.
Education for Empire appropriately rests heavily on the critical work of Elizabeth Cohen, Linda Kerber, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, and Natalia Molina, who explore the shifting terrains of citizenship, race, and empire in modern America. Stratton places formal public education in this scholarly conversation by incorporating an expansive geography and diverse peoples, from Hawaiian cosmopolitans and excluded Asian immigrants to the segregated children of Jim Crow and Juan Crow schools. He “urges a rethinking of the temporal and geographic anchoring of the period” so that we can see the links between immigrant exclusion and racialized segregation and between nation and empire building (pp. 6–7). He argues that we must view colonialism “as a central ideological, narrative, and organizational force in schools at home [mainland] and abroad [colonies]” (p. 7). This, he insists, was requisite of formal public schooling in the era so as to ensure that the migrating colonial child (Filipino or Puerto Rican) or the internal migrant child laborer (the “native-born racial minority” or “foreigner within”) could easily conform to the “hierarchical social order that transcended the walls of the classrooms” (p. 7).
In six chapters, Stratton allows readers to test the hypothesis of “good citizenship” as we journey across the American empire. He begins, in chapter 1, at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900 to highlight how Americans taught their schoolchildren to perceive their nation as the center of the world. Stratton explains how textbooks in civics, geography, and history depicted and anchored the idea of “the United States and white Americans as an exceptional nation and people within the broader scope of the world's nations and races” (p. 17). In geography, schoolchildren “‘learned to divide the world’ into metageographical and racial categories” (p. 17) and “‘natural’ hierarchies” (p. 18), where Anglo-Saxon contributions could be rationalized through studies of evolution, social Darwinism, civilization, and “cartographies of climate” (p. 17). In history, exceptionalism, geopolitics, and wars of conquest effortlessly justified American progress, while civics “approved ways to think and act as citizens of an exceptional nation and ascendant global power” (p. 18). Undergirded by one another, each discipline and set of scholars “steadfastly believed they imparted to schoolchildren geographical, historical, and political truths derived from objective science” (p. 18).
Stratton offers chapters 2 through 6 as regional case studies to show how the politics of empire and race shift within US communities. In chapters 2 and 5, he examines “whiteness” and its integral relationship to the “twinned tasks” or “twinned projects” of nation and empire in California and New York, respectively (pp. 51, 146). For example, he simultaneously unfolds the history of Asian American school segregation (which he argues rested on “separate but equal” school laws upheld by the California State Supreme Court in 1874 “twenty-two years before Plessy”), while also explaining how California cosmopolitanism rested not on “the concept of a global community of equals, but instead on global hierarchies of race and nationality” (pp. 53–55). In chapter 3, he explores Hawaii's schools in the era of annexation, where an emphasis on haole cosmopolitanism translated into curricula designed to secure the economic and racial order of US colonialism and Pacific Rim control. In chapter 4, he extrapolates W. E. B. DuBois's twentieth-century problem of the color line as a “global struggle for racial equality” in order to expose how “Atlanta's segregated schools constitute a crucial aspect of US domestic and imperial culture at the turn of the century” (p. 125). Finally, in chapter 6, he turns to Mexican and Puerto Rican colonials, where he puts into practice Pilar Cruz's approach by “trying to get across some of the complexity of our situation down here—cultures coming together in both negative and positive ways” (Lone Star, 1996). He also extends his argument about colonial education models through the 1950s and across Spanish-speaking ethnic groups in California, Texas, and Puerto Rico.
I appreciate the broad scope of Stratton's work. He links Gilded Age and Progressive Era educational work to larger US nationalist and imperialist aims and offers chapters on a range of peoples and places within the American empire, which allows him to bring Natalia Molina's “relational framework” to the history of education (p. 176). In this regard, the book offers undergraduate and graduate students a quick, in-depth introduction to diverse social, legal, and political histories of American schooling. The Latinx educational history complements the stronger conversations on Asian American, African American, and European American schooling. Stratton's work is thoughtful and desired as we expand our historiography of American public schools. Overall, I recommend Education for Empire to anyone interested in the history of education, empire, race, and the continuing effort to bring intersectionality to our work.
