The centenary of the APSA provides a timely occasion to reflect upon the science of politics, then and now. This includes the science of politics as civic education. There is not enough space here to offer an account of this disciplinary identity for the intervening century between 1903 and 2003. If there were, this paper might deserve the title “The Science of Politics—as Civic Education—Now and Then” to convey the fitful and episodic character of our Association's identification with public pedagogy. The bursts of interest in this identity (and the practical work that attends it) have been significant, and a lengthier study would have to attend to them. But on the whole, scholarly research, university administration, and government service—more or less in that order—have dominated our discipline's identity and practical work. At the founding of the APSA and again recently, however, serious attention was paid to the prospects of political science identifying itself in terms of its direct contributions to civic education. Befitting our centennial remembrance, my main interests lie in shedding some light on the Association and its first members in and around 1903. In going back, one finds the familiar and the strange; the comforts of inheritance and some skeletons in the closet. Neither hagiography nor debunking is in order, only some critical inquiry into then and now.

We are now amidst a rather stunning outpouring of work on citizenship and citizen education in the face of continuing reports about the apathy and lack of political knowledge to be found in our students and the citizenry at large, as well as revelations about partisan efforts to depress civic engagement on the way to the voting booth and elsewhere. The APSA has been doing its part to facilitate this outpouring by hosting discussion in the pages of this journal, and by promoting panels at its national conferences, including the centennial conference in Philadelphia. But of particular notice was the formation, in 1996, of the APSA Task Force on Civic Education in the 21st Century, on which sat Association presidents and prominent colleagues (APSA 1998, 637). The Task Force joined arms with other organizations—themselves populated with political scientists—including the National Alliance for Civic Education (NACE), the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), the Civic Practices Network, the National Issues Forum, and others. It also created an email discussion list—APSA-CIVED—that is actively underway. After six years of such work, alas, the Task Force met, as one of the co-chairs recently put it, its “quiet demise in 2002” (Dubnick 2003, 253). He went on to observe: “For good or ill, there emerged no comprehensive statement or grand strategy that can be pointed to as the group's historical legacy.” Time will tell, however, whether the Task Force (whose preliminary reports were unveiled in Philadelphia) will have the effect of encouraging particular tactics if not grand strategies for improving civic education. The Task Force, in any case, left a trail of reflection about what political scientists needed to teach in the twenty-first century: tolerance, collaboration, analysis, and “our traditions” (namely, those “liberal aspirations to freedom, dignity, and equality embedded in our political history”) (APSA 1998, 636).

Centennial curiosity wonders how this compares with the earliest efforts of the APSA. The most notable institutional developments consisted in some Committees on Instruction in the early twentieth century, especially the Committee of Five in 1905 (chaired by William Schaper) and the Committee of Seven in 1911 (under Charles Grove Haines). (A related Committee on Practical Training for Public Service, in 1914, was led by Charles McCarthy.) These committees (or their members) issued reports, articles, or books (from 1906 to 1916 and beyond). The early 1920s witnessed a similar burst of committee work and report writing (spearheaded by William Bennett Munro). Some of these committees and reports have recently been remembered and their legacy debated in the pages of this journal (by Schachter 1998; Leonard 1999; and Bennett 1999), as well as in other places (by Somit and Tanenhaus 1967, 80–85, 134–40; and, most instructively, Leonard 1995). Hoping to inform our current prospects, these colleagues seize on the undeniable fact that the early committees failed to keep the discipline's attention on civic education for very long; or they find encouragement to give civic education “one more try” in light of shared problems, similar goals, and substantive congruities, including the call for “experiential learning” around local politics and issues (Schachter 1998, 635). Regarding this last point, it is noteworthy that the APSA endorsed the “community civics movement” and, by extension, “the social center movement” in the most important of the early committees' publications, The Teaching of Government (APSA 1916, 5–7, 83–88). Out of these Progressive-era movements emerged some of the earliest uses of the concept and very term “social capital” (Putnam 2000; Farr 2004).

Encouragement is owed, I believe, to those who would have the Association give civic education one more try—or as many tries as it takes. However, what we should be trying, in light of the past, can be informed only partially by early committee reports. For one thing, they were only about schooling; and their psychological suppositions about the developmental process of learning make them appear to the contemporary reader as “well-intentioned exercises in fantasy” (Dubnick 2003, 254). They also failed to specify any larger intellectual, pedagogical, or political commitments. They were silent about women and issues of gender, as well as about race and colonial government. You would not know from reading the reports that women could not yet vote nationally, that the contentious suffrage policies of Reconstruction were within living memory, or that colonial wars were preparing the way for world war. So, to take the measure of civic education then, we must recover the worldview (including some of its internal contestations and telling silences) lying behind the APSA's first committees on instruction.

For political scientists at the turn of the last century, civic education was crucial for stabilizing and moderating the American experiment in democracy. In an era marked by industrialization, immigration, class conflict, and other forces of rapid change—not to mention corrupt politicians and ineffective bureaucrats, so the Progressive Era judged—citizens, whether young or old, native or newly arrived, needed to learn (more) about their duties, rights, and privileges, as well as about government, party, and administration. There was much anxiety about the challenges this posed. But political scientists thought that their discipline could and should contribute to the large tasks facing their students, among whom they counted statesmen, civil servants, and youth. Thus, W. W. Willoughby, the first and long-serving secretary and later president of the APSA, prefaced his text on The Rights and Duties of American Citizenship with the claim that citizens, especially youth, needed “a knowledge of the nature of political authority, the purposes for which it exists, and the general governmental means through which such purposes are attained” (1898, 3). Such an education was more fundamental than “civics” courses tied to the formalities of the Constitution. It also required understanding the practical arts of statesmanship, administration, and/or citizenship, at least for those who could (come to) exercise them. It also required historical knowledge about social problems, transformations of law, and the unfolding of ideas and institutions.

The political scientists' worldview thus connected civic education to rights and duties by way of understanding practical arts, social analysis, and history. These connections were tied to professional associations, as well as pedagogical convictions. Before the founding of the APSA, many political scientists had been members of the American Social Science Association, which was dedicated to the investigation of social problems and the advancement of civil service reform. Political scientists maintained these practical and reformist tendencies, regarding civic education, even after “the organization of the APSA in 1903” struck “the deathblow” to the ASSA (Haskell 1977, 230). There was a more immediate associational tie between political scientists and historians. It helps to recall, in this connection, that the APSA emerged directly out of the American Historical Association, during the AHA's nineteenth annual convention in New Orleans in 1903. Despite the creation of a new and separate association to study politics scientifically, no deep severance from the historical profession came about as an immediate result of the founding. In fact, the new APSA intentionally sought to “maintain the closest and most harmonious relations possible” with the AHA (Willoughby 1904, 110). Most APSA members remained members of the AHA, as well. Many academics were named Professor of History and Political Science, a title inaugurated by Francis Lieber at Columbia in 1857. Five presidents of the APSA—Woodrow Wilson, Simeon Baldwin, Charles Beard, A. B. Hart, and William Dunning—also served as presidents of the AHA. In a presidential toast of 1916, Dunning grandly proclaimed in the borrowed words of Daniel Webster: “History and Political Science, now and forever, two and inseparable” (in Dunning 1937, xv). Twelve of the first 16 meetings of the APSA were held jointly with the AHA. This practice ended only in 1927 when Munro delivered his presidential address on “Physics and Politics—An Old Analogy Revisited.” In the address, with recent committee work in mind, Munro announced that the unscientific “campaigns of civic education” amounted to “pure futility and waste. The ardent efforts of well-meaning men and women are frustrated by their sheer irrelevance to the end desired” (Munro 1928, 7).

Before (and after) the break with professional historians, the founding generation of the APSA maintained intellectual ties to history as a matter of science, politics, and the education of citizens, administrators, and statesmen. There was general agreement about the appropriateness of “the historical, comparative method” for studying politics, and about “the state” as the locus of politics. In the first presidential address, for example, Frank S. Goodnow hailed the APSA as the first professional association dedicated to “the scientific study of the organization and functions of the State” and to “the work of teaching” about it (1904, 36, 46). The call in the subsequent committee reports for students to study administration, municipal government, or community affairs meant that students should study the state in terms of a particular locale or an actual function, and to do so historically and comparatively. Moreover, when Paul S. Reinsch, founding member and later president of the APSA, announced that the educational goal of the new Association was to “promote the better understanding of the obligations resting upon our citizenship,” he was restating the ideal of duty to the state (1904, 158). Duties were correlates of rights, though they dominated the correlation; and civic education consisted mainly in learning about (how to exercise) duties and rights in light of the actual state.

In these early writings, however, duties and rights were not universal across race, gender, or nationality. This had profound implications for civic education. Women had their duties and rights, but among them were not to be counted voting or holding elective office, save in rare cases; and some of the most famous political scientists (before and after the creation of the APSA) argued against “woman suffrage” (see Dietz and Farr 1998). Following the general line of argument of Johann K. Bluntschli (for whom “the State was Man”), they included Lieber, Theodore Dwight Woolsey, John W. Burgess, A. Lawrence Lowell, and Woodrow Wilson, among others. Willoughby piled up a number of objections, beyond the alleged fact that “very few women as yet desire the privilege of voting.” His culminating objection was that “because most women are not engaged actively in business and public life, they would not have that practical training and knowledge which would enable them to cast their votes intelligently” (Willoughby 1898, 31–32). For these prominent political scientists, differential civic education for men and women followed implicitly or explicitly. Even for political scientists of the state who were not publicly hostile to “woman suffrage”—like Jeremiah Jenks, who headed the 1902 exploratory committee that called for an inclusive Association—differential civic education was the natural consequence of the distributed “class of duties” to “the State.”

These queenly images and gender-laden urgings adorned Jenks's 1889 address on “The Making of Citizens,” a prescient title for another APSA founder, Charles E. Merriam.

There were also differential duties and rights (and so education) dependent upon race (or the various characteristics then thought to identify race). The implications of this for civic education were complicated—or perhaps over-determined—by another fact of the founding. The arrival of the APSA coincided and, in the minds of some prominent members, conspired with an AHA plan to bring Southerners into the fold of professional historians (and historical political scientists). The meeting in New Orleans was the very first meeting of the AHA in the Old South. It was an intentional act by a professional association to assist national amity and unity in the post-Reconstruction era. Remembering the centenary that year of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 seemed symbolic for such a purpose. Yet, this gesture of amity and unity was far from inclusive; and it came burdened with a contentious set of issues affecting civic education. Edwin A. Alderman, the president of Tulane in whose halls much of the 1903 meeting took place, welcomed the assembled members by reminding them of “the fundamental tragic fact in the life of the South, the presence of the Negro—the all-important economic fact of the present as of the past.” He continued: “For 60 years, the South stood ready to die and did die for the doctrine of state sovereignty, and today it would die for the doctrine of racial integrity” (reported in Haskins 1904, 24). Papers were read, including one by John R. Ficklen, a founding member of the APSA, on “the difficulty of dealing with negro suffrage” in Louisiana's post-Civil War constitution and during Reconstruction (in Haskins 1904, 33).

It is impossible to determine from the records how these words were received at the convention. But among those present, Dunning, for one, was a severe critic of Reconstruction precisely because of its enforcement of the voting rights of African descendants in America in the face of white Southern resistance. Dunning followed Burgess in these views; and he was followed in turn by several founding figures and eventual presidents of the APSA, like Wilson, James Garner, and James Bryce. Indeed, in the year of the APSA, Bryce (1903, 39) lectured to Americans on the lessons of Reconstruction and race relations: “you must not … legislate in the teeth of facts. The great bulk of negroes were not fit for the suffrage.” It is unclear how many political scientists or historians shared these views or expressly endorsed “a nationalist and racist historiographical consensus” (Novick 1988, 76). Hart, apparently, thought somewhat differently, to judge by a paper he read on “The Realities of Negro Suffrage” at the second annual meeting of the APSA in Baltimore in 1905. He concluded, in a reserved tone, that the rights and duties of voting should turn upon a voter's character not his color (Hart 1906, 165). Hart was then sharply criticized by one discussant and denounced by another for misunderstanding the racial realities confronting “the Saxon people of the South” and especially “the demon of Negro sovereignty” as “the crowning infamy of the Fifteenth Amendment” (Mitchell and Shepherd 1906, 169–70). The commentary ended on a chilling note: “Some day, let me say, in closing, the ingredients of your poisoned chalice may be commended to your own lips.” (Within a few years and for whatever reasons, Hart would write about the civic incapacities and natural inferiority of African Americans in The Southern South of 1910). Other members of the new APSA were silent, at least in print. Indeed, silence was the general norm, as well as a policy sufficient to accommodate white Southern inclusion in professional academic life. Silence or relative inattention, moreover, became a disciplinary heritage when dealing with race (see Walton, Miller, and McCormick 1995; and Smith, in this symposium). For almost all parties, however, the implications of their contested views (or silence) were directly relevant to civic education, for whites and blacks. This issue was avoided in the earliest reports of the Committees on Instruction. Only belatedly, in “The Study of Civics” (APSA 1922, 120), do we find reference to “The Negro Problem.” Even then, there was no specification of what the problem was, or how political scientists should teach it.

A related “race problem” operated as a worldview behind the printed words in the committee reports concerning colonial government. This problem raised the question of the educational duties that one race or nation owed another. Consider the duties of “a higher nation” in Willoughby's treatise on Social Justice on the eve of the APSA:

This view was offered as an explicit endorsement of Burgess, who contributed to the preliminary committee work of the APSA. Indeed, Burgess preached a more far-reaching racialist version of Teutonism. Other prominent founding members and officers, like Reinsch and Bernard Moses, also racialized civic education in papers on colonial government at the 1904 and 1905 annual conferences. Moses (1905, 92) spoke of “the education for civilization” that was owed to “inferior races” like the Filipinos. In this missionary spirit, a new member of the APSA—H. C. Morris (1905, 116)—proposed the creation of “a colonial section” of the Association as “a permanent adjunct of the colonial system” itself. The APSA would in this way greatly assist “the education of the people” in the United States and its colonial dependencies.

Many historians of the discipline and many more political scientists have not attended very closely (if at all) to these various dimensions of civic education at the time of the founding of the APSA. The centenary, perhaps, provides a timely occasion to remedy this situation, well beyond what is offered here. If the Association is to be encouraged to give civic education another try, then it must do so in light of the history that is uniquely ours, from which we have much more to learn and for which we bear some responsibility. That history is mixed, as we have seen, forcing us to reflect upon it in different ways. The worldview of political scientists “now” has no place for views proscribing suffrage on grounds of race and gender or propagating the racial destiny of “civilized states” to educate the world. But the practical and ideological consequences of these views remain very much a part of contemporary politics, to judge by persistent patterns of civic exclusion, widespread disparities in political participation, and prejudicial opinions about race, gender, immigration, or America's role in the world. If we are to recover or advance the science of politics as civic education, we must proceed in our teaching and scholarship by dealing openly and critically with these practical and ideological consequences. To proceed in this way, furthermore, is not to forget or ignore but rather to confront and bring to light the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century worldview that set things on their way. This seems to be a responsibility for the APSA insofar as founding political scientists were party to expounding that worldview. And that worldview, in any case, was not only composed of what to us are objectionable views, given the history briefly canvassed above. There are opportunities for pedagogical reflection here, too. The formative Association and its committees on instruction were debatably onto something important about the connection of political science to history, the need for historical investigation of social problems, the conjunction of rights and duties, and the concerted effort to provide concrete suggestions to APSA members about texts and teaching. “Community civics” or its descendants, moreover, appear to promise further prospects, especially if used to develop the skills and practical arts of active citizenship. These are only some of the lessons and challenges—mixed as they are, but worthy of debate—concerning the science of politics, then and now, as we look forward on our Association's 100th anniversary.