Despite what its title might suggest, Making Schools American: Nationalism and the Origin of Modern Educational Politics is not a history of Americanization efforts undertaken through the public school system. Rather, the book traces how Progressive Era educational administrators used the rhetoric of nationalism to bolster campaigns for the expansion of public education. Through a careful examination of the reports and addresses of administrators in New York, Utah, and Texas, the book follows key celebrations, legislative initiatives, and public campaigns intended to build popular support for public education. Such efforts included the beginning of “patriotic” school practices—flags on every schoolhouse, the pledge of allegiance, civic parades—that, decades later, would be championed by conservatives as key features of the American school system.
This book offers an important contribution to Progressive Era histories that focus on either the national or the local level by turning attention to individual states. State-level bureaucracies and legislation helped foster the enormous expansion of public education in these years, justifying Ewert’s decision to begin his study in the Progressive Era, rather than with the mid-nineteenth century common school movement, which was also championed with nationalist arguments. Nationalism, Ewert argues, became the language through which state-level administrators turned public schools into a purported panacea for a rapidly industrializing economy and a racially and ethnically divided polity. While the era’s nationalist rhetoric has certainly been explored elsewhere, Ewert here claims that its use “politicized” schools in a new way, ideologically constraining the purpose of education and paving the way for a more conservative flag-waving patriotism and contemporary culture wars (3). Ewert, however, uses the term nationalism so broadly in his historical analysis that it encompasses almost any suggestion of national benefits from education, making it hard to imagine a public official avoiding such language.
The book begins in New York and traces a set of campaigns that reflect the somewhat idiosyncratic pursuits of the state superintendent of public instruction, Andrew Sloan Draper: “Prussianizing” New York schools through compulsory education laws, promoting Indian boarding school policies, mandating the patriotic observance of Arbor Day, and establishing Brooklyn’s Columbian School Celebration. Ewert moves next to Utah, where public education became central to its bid for statehood in a campaign led in part by Mormons eager to “quell criticisms of the LDS Church’s polygamous past” and prove their Americanism (9–10). In 1890, Utah’s existing loose network of ad hoc free schools (mostly under LDS church auspices) and missionary schools were supplanted by a new territorial public school system that would become a national “model” for progressive school reform by World War I (10). The final chapter moves on to Texas, a diverse state with large Mexican American and Black communities, whose public educational system, like those of other former Confederate states, lagged significantly behind the rest of the nation. Ewert traces the efforts of the Conference for Education in Texas, a private organization seeking to expand Texas public schools, which had to carefully tie their invocations of nationalism to state and regional pride. While the Conference was short-lived, it set the stage for state superintendent Anne Webb Blanton, elected in 1918, who successfully weaponized public schools as tools to enforce “100 per cent pure Americanism” and English-only instruction, linking public education to a racist, nativist nationalism (160).
Ewert acknowledges that this nationalist agenda was a “coercive” project to “force a narrow vision of Americanism on an increasingly diverse student body” (9), but his narrative hews closely to the lofty rhetoric of his white, Protestant administrators. Nativism and white supremacy are acknowledged, but outside of Texas their role in shaping the broader project of public schooling is not fully conceptualized. Given the book’s theme, the long history of xenophobia (and particularly anti-Catholic sentiment) in driving public school expansion seems surprisingly underexplored. This may be explained in part by how Ewert’s choice to frame his analysis by contrasting northern progressive reformers’ “forward-looking” vision of the nation’s future and conservative efforts to “preserve the status quo” in Texas (163). On matters of race and immigration, however, a progressive-conservative dichotomy can provide a misleading framework for understanding early-twentieth-century politics. Ewert notes that the New York superintendent, for instance, called the parents of truant children—more likely to be poor or immigrants—“ignorant, vicious, indifferent, and depraved” (18) and denounced Indian reservations as “nests of uncontrolled vice” (27–28). A Brooklyn administrator, meanwhile, complained about the “moral diseases” brought by “swarms” of Polish and Jewish immigrants (46). Ewert also shows that Ellwood Cubberly, a leading educational reformer, praised Utah for its “excellent racial stock” that lacked the problems brought by “a large number of foreign born, Orientals, or Negroes” (116). Calls for national grandeur and unity through schooling typically rested on a clear understanding of schools’ role in managing immigrant and nonwhite populations—a desire that administrators shared with the (native-born, white) population they appealed to.
A missed opportunity to explore nationalist discourse in promoting public schools among nonwhite communities would have been the efforts of Black Americans in the South, the original champions of public education as a tool of national inclusion. The Conference for Education in Texas, Ewert states, focused on winning over rural, white Texans, and although Black educators seemed like natural allies, “interracial collaboration was anathema” (139). The Conference also “made no effort to reach out to the state’s Mexican American population” (145). This choice of a case study perhaps narrowed what might have been a broader treatment of divergent visions of nationalism in the promotion of Texas public schooling.
Ewert’s most helpful intervention is his state-level analysis. His attention to nationalist appeals, however, leaves little room for tracing the nuts and bolts of which state capacity was built through schooling, including how funding, administration, and instruction actually worked on the ground. Recounting the words of administrators also crowds out other voices, including those of students, parents, teachers, and community members. The author’s choice of three states helpfully illustrates the importance of regional differences, but their distinctiveness, without clear comparative metrics, makes the book feel a bit fragmented.
Overall, this book adds to a growing historiography of Progressive Era state-building through public education. Ewert convincingly demonstrates that the discourse of nationalism proved capacious enough to rally constituents around distinct visions of the nation’s future. Then as now, Americans disagreed on this vision, but they all agreed that schools would play a key role in achieving it.
