In hindsight, it is tempting to view the twenty years prior to World War I as building inexorably toward that conflict. After all, the 1890s witnessed the spread of European imperialism, the forging of secret alliances among the great powers, the development of new weaponry, and the stockpiling of armaments. But these events in turn gave rise to a sincere desire among many world leaders to use international law to codify and regulate the rules of war. Both the men in power throughout Europe and the North Atlantic and observers in their countries believed that agreements among nations could be reached that would check the rise of militarism and forestall violent conflicts. In 1898, Czar Nicholas II of Russia invited the nations of the world to gather at The Hague to negotiate a new set of international laws and a new system of international arbitration. The following year, representatives from twenty-six countries, including the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, gathered for the First Hague Conference, where they outlawed certain war tactics and established a Permanent Court of Arbitration. Over the next few years, a handful of nations submitted disputes to the new court, including the United States over a border incident with Mexico. Most famously, US President Theodore Roosevelt served as a mediator in the Russo-Japanese War using the machinery of the court; his efforts earned him a Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 and seemed to confirm to the world the viability of arbitration. In 1907, the Second Hague Conference brought forty-four nations together to establish conventions on the laws of war, naval warfare, and neutrality, as well as to renounce the use of force in collecting international debts. The delegates also agreed that periodic conferences were helpful in making progress toward solving international problems; they agreed to meet again in 1915.Footnote 1
Many in the United States followed these developments closely. In the years following the First Hague Conference, and especially after the second, the peace movement grew dramatically. By 1912 at least twenty-five peace and internationalist groups existed in the United States, and the various congresses and conventions they organized attracted support from prominent people across the country.Footnote 2 As David Patterson points out, this was not because people sensed a looming war. On the contrary, “These were years of international tranquility for the United States.”Footnote 3 The peace movement attracted large numbers of Americans because of its practical and conservative orientation. This was not a radical pacifist movement made up of people who opposed war on principle. These were progressive reformers, both liberal and more conservative, who believed that the ever-present problems of war and violence could be studied systematically and that practical solutions could be found and rationally applied. In other words, mainstream progressives sought to reform international relations just as they had reformed the civil service, politics, local government, public health, and other institutions.Footnote 4
Educators were often at the forefront of these efforts. Boston publisher Edwin Ginn founded the World Peace Foundation in 1910 to study the cause of international peace and to distribute information to colleges and secondary schools. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was established in the same year to promote educational campaigns for peace. Prominent progressives such as David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University, and Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia, lectured and wrote widely on the need to educate Americans on the benefits of arbitration and international law. “International schools” began cropping up to promote cross-cultural knowledge and exchange.Footnote 5 Almost exclusively, however, these efforts were the work of intellectuals and university professors, who focused on fostering internationalism among college students and on educating the general public.
Fannie Fern Andrews believed children, even those in elementary school, could, and should, also be taught the principles of international peace. Andrews was a former schoolteacher from Massachusetts who had earned a BA at Radcliffe in 1902 and subsequently devoted her time to various progressive reform efforts in Boston. In 1908, she founded the American School Peace League (ASPL) to implement peace education programs in American elementary and secondary schools. Inspired by what Andrews called the “Hague movement,” the League's stated aim was “to secure the cooperation of the educational public of America in the project for promoting international justice and equity.”Footnote 6 Andrews believed that children as young as six could be educated to embrace peace and cooperation, to settle disputes without resorting to violence, and to tolerate difference—in short, could learn everything they would need to grow up to be peaceful citizens, not just of their nation but of the world community. Made up of state branches overseen by a national executive board, the League grew quickly, expanding into over forty states in just six years. Andrews recruited various prominent superintendents and other education officials to serve as the League's national officers and members of the board, while she oversaw daily operations as the executive secretary. In its early years the League was funded by prominent organizations such as Ginn's World Peace Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment, lending it legitimacy as well as financial security. Driven by Andrews, the League worked for over two decades to promote the cause of world peace and international cooperation across the country. It was the only organization dedicated to peace education before World War I that focused exclusively on elementary and secondary students.Footnote 7
The League's primary instrument for this work was its own curriculum, A Course in Citizenship, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1914. Coauthored by Andrews and four other women educators, A Course in Citizenship presented teachers with monthly lessons for children in first through eighth grades. The idea of the curriculum's designers was that students would learn the basic principles of fairness, cooperation, and goodwill toward others in familiar settings, and as they grew older they would be encouraged to apply those principles to broader contexts. In Grade One the focus was on the home, and the main theme of the lessons was kindliness to one's family members. Children heard stories and learned poems that emphasized the importance of kindness, generosity, and good manners. Grade Two centered on the school and the playground, Grade Three on the neighborhood, Grade Four on the town and city, and Grades Five and Six on the nation. As they progressed, students learned lessons about friendship, neighborliness, civic responsibility, and other values whose larger role became apparent as they approached Grades Seven and Eight. In these culminating years, students examined the international origins of the United States and the current role of the United States in the “world family.” Through these lessons, according to Andrews, children learned how to become citizens of the world.
By expanding the realm of the community from the local to the national to the global, and by educating children to think of themselves not just as citizens of their own country but of a larger world community, the ASPL sought nothing less than to end war by inculcating the values of peace. A Course in Citizenship taught children about respect and goodwill toward others, the importance of learning from other cultures, and the peaceful settlement of disputes. Students learned about the Hague Conferences, the development of arbitration treaties and international law, and the role of arbitration in resolving conflicts between nations. Andrews believed that these lessons, over time, would reduce instances of war by raising a generation of children devoted not only to the ideals but also to the mechanisms of peace. She was by no means the first person to argue for a connection between education and peace, but she was among the first to try to systematize and institutionalize peace education in elementary schools by organizing teachers and designing curricula. In the same way that other Progressive Era reformers saw education as a remedy for poverty, child labor, and other social ills, Andrews and the ASPL believed it could be harnessed to eradicate war.Footnote 8
But other lessons embedded in the curriculum reflected more problematic aspects of early twentieth-century politics and culture. The years of the Hague Conferences were the same years in which the United States witnessed unprecedented levels of immigration; expanded its overseas empire in the Philippines, the Pacific, and the Caribbean; and debated what to do with the millions of nonwhite people who had now come directly or indirectly under its sphere of influence. Like many progressives, Andrews and her colleagues subscribed to theories of “progress” and “civilization” that were highly racialized. They believed that white, native-born Americans were inherently more civilized than nonwhites and immigrants. They believed that as a superior nation—representing the pinnacle of industrial development, capitalism, and liberal democracy—the United States had not only a destiny but a duty to serve as a model for the rest of the world and to help lead other nations along the same path of achievement.Footnote 9 This perspective sheds a different light on A Course in Citizenship. I argue that while Andrews and the ASPL saw themselves as educating children to be peaceful world citizens, at the same time they were also teaching white, native-born Americans to see themselves as the only rightful leaders of a new world order. A Course in Citizenship calibrated the standards of progress and civilization by which these children were to measure not only themselves but others around the world. Education for peace was also education for the new American empire.
This argument expands on existing scholarship by setting peace education within the larger context of US foreign relations, especially during the sixteen years after the War of 1898 (sometimes called the Spanish-American War) and before World War I. The handful of scholars who have examined A Course in Citizenship have done so only within a national context, rather than an international one. They tend to laud the book for promoting tolerance and celebrating diversity. They point out, for instance, that it was much more inclusive of immigrants than other curricula of the period.Footnote 10 I contend, however, that this rhetoric of inclusion was superficial; when set against the backdrop of US imperialism after 1898, it takes on a much different cast.
Other recent histories of education in the Progressive Era have considered this imperial context.Footnote 11 Clif Stratton, for instance, has shed crucial light on the interconnections between the spread of citizenship education and the expansion of American empire. His focus, however, is on overtly nationalist curricula that differentiated (implicitly or explicitly) between “good” and “bad” citizens. By contrast, A Course in Citizenship claimed to teach all US schoolchildren about peace, cooperation, and international goodwill. But as Stratton argues, imperialism—both formal and informal, both internal and external—was ubiquitous in early twentieth-century America and thus “needs to be understood as a central ideological, narrative, and organizational force in schools at home as well as abroad. Administrators, teachers, and textbook authors actively imagined and institutionalized a hierarchical social order that transcended the walls of classrooms and informed debates about immigration, racialized forms of citizenship, and U.S. international power.”Footnote 12 At first glance, this claim seems incongruous with a curriculum full of lessons about peace and goodwill. In fact, the two were mutually constitutive.
This essay first considers A Course in Citizenship on its own terms, examining it within the context of the early twentieth-century peace movement as well as the broader educational trends of that era. In many ways, the League's curriculum reflected ongoing developments in social studies and civics education. But what made A Course in Citizenship distinct was the extent to which it promoted internationalism, taking the well-known “expanding environments” approach far beyond the confines of the nation. It was precisely that focus, however, that in turn revealed the limits of the ASPL's internationalism. The second half of the essay problematizes the ASPL's international approach by closely analyzing its treatment of immigrants and nonwhites and its portrayal of the United States’ role in world affairs. Andrews's and her colleagues’ assumptions that the United States was the only nation that could guide the world toward a more international, peaceful future undermined some of their claims for tolerance and equality. Given the broader cultural context of the time, this is not altogether surprising, but it does draw attention to the limits of peace education in the pre-World War I era.
Educating Americans for Peace
In the years following the Second Hague Conference, as thousands of American flocked to join peace organizations and sought to learn more about international law and arbitration, Andrews decided to focus her efforts on elementary and intermediate education. “There is nothing more needed in the extension of the idea of international solidarity,” she wrote to a friend in 1911, “than a concerted effort among the teachers of the world to train the children of today to become the just, sympathetic and righteous citizens of the next generation.”Footnote 13 For Andrews, educating children for peace meant educating them for what she called “world citizenship,” for membership in a global polity, charged with responsibility to promote tolerance and cooperation around the world. Hence the title of the curriculum—this was first and foremost a course in citizenship, and the proper expression of that citizenship would eventually bring about peace.
Details of Andrews's personal history are scarce, but by her own account the Hague movement inspired what became the ASPL.Footnote 14 Born in 1867, she grew up in Lynn, Massachusetts, and attended the Salem Normal School. After graduating in 1884, she taught in a local elementary school for six years before marrying and moving to Boston. With a supportive husband, financial security, and no children, Andrews had considerable time and freedom to pursue first her own education—she graduated from Radcliffe with degrees in both education and psychology—and later her activism for peace and education reform. Andrews might best be characterized as a centrist progressive. Unlike her more leftist contemporary Jane Addams, she was a peace reformer rather than a pacifist, and she did not oppose war on principle. She was a suffragist but not a feminist; she believed women should vote, but would not have supported full legal equality for women. Before 1908, she devoted most of her volunteer efforts to the Boston Home and School Association (an early version of a parent-teacher association), serving as its general secretary despite the fact that she had no children herself. As Andrews followed the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907, she began to think more and more about how to use the schools to further international peace. Her answer was education for world citizenship—training children to think of themselves not only as members of a local or national community but of a global one.
In 1907, the education division of the American Social Science Association dedicated its portion of the group's annual meeting to the topic of “education and the peace movement.” Andrews was one of several speakers invited to share her perspective. In her address—given at the same time the Second Hague Conference was meeting in the Netherlands—Andrews outlined what she saw as the relationship between education and international peace. “The supreme aim of education,” she argued, “is to develop men and women who can carry on effectively and nobly the work of the world.” The new “spirit of internationalism,” the new sense of “world consciousness,” demanded different approaches to educating children. “At no time has it been more necessary for the teacher to have a full appreciation and properly conceived notion of the forces making for development than the present age, permeated as it is by the new spirit of internationalism.”Footnote 15 Teachers had to realize the degree to which the world was already “amalgamated” and the extent to which that process would continue in the future. Commerce, educational ideals, political principles, religion, literature—these things were shaped around the world by the “intermingling” of the interests of all human beings. This process had led to a true world consciousness, Andrews contended. Therefore, “the teacher of the twentieth century is an international figure, and he can never perform his highest function until he is imbued with this international consciousness. He should stand shoulder to shoulder with his fellow-teachers in the world for the achievement of a higher civilization. One generation of teaching the principles of justice, peace, and international unity would revolutionize the world.”Footnote 16
This is what Andrews set out to do with A Course in Citizenship. She wanted to give teachers something practical, suggestions for a curriculum that they would be able to adapt to their own needs and their own classrooms. She also wanted to take into account students’ early natural development. In an early version of A Course in Citizenship, titled “A Course of Study in Good Will,” Andrews wrote, “Good will in little children expresses itself through kindness and helpfulness at home and in school. Peace among nations has as yet no meaning to children. We must begin where they see our meaning.”Footnote 17 Andrews recruited veteran educators to help her realize these goals. Ella Lyman Cabot became the book's official editor; she had been at Radcliffe with Andrews and served on the Massachusetts Board of Education while teaching in private schools in Boston. Mary McSkimmon was a grade school principal in a Boston suburb, while Mabel Hill served as dean of a boys’ school. Fanny E. Coe had written several children's books.Footnote 18 Between the five of them they divided up the eight grade levels; each woman wrote one or two chapters, and then Andrews and Cabot edited the whole.
No information exists tracking the publication and circulation of A Course in Citizenship, but the organizational success of the ASPL gave Andrews cause for optimism about its impact. By 1914, the League had over forty state branches as well as affiliated groups in high schools and normal schools across the country. That year the League's pamphlet on Peace Day—celebrated on May 18, the anniversary of the First Hague Conference—sold 65,000 copies.Footnote 19 The League enjoyed regular financial support from Edwin Ginn, Andrew Carnegie, and Mrs. Malcolm J. Forbes, and had secured the endorsement of the National Education Association (NEA), the National School of Superintendents, and the US Bureau of Education. As the League's secretary, Andrews received hundreds of letters requesting League materials, suggesting that its message resonated widely among teachers. Upon its publication, A Course in Citizenship was reviewed favorably, both in the Journal of Education and the Advocate of Peace, the leading journals in the fields of education and peace activism, respectively. Andrews also noted that the book regularly appeared on educational publishers’ best-seller lists and was very popular both with state teachers’ associations and within the NEA.Footnote 20
Cabot set the tone for the book with her prefatory message to schoolteachers. As early as six years, she argued, children were old enough to be aware of their membership within a family and a school, and every year their consciousness of community membership grew wider and wider. “Throw a pebble into a stream,” Cabot wrote. “From a small center the ever-widening circles radiate till they reach the most distant shore. So loyalty to the simplest ties may enlarge circle by circle in the stream of a child's growing life till it reaches the shore of good will among all men.”Footnote 21 This was the entire premise of A Course in Citizenship in a nutshell. Beginning with the home and expanding outward to encompass the school, the neighborhood, the town, the nation, and the world, children would gradually broaden their understanding of membership and loyalty until they saw themselves as part of a single global community. Cabot's introduction encapsulated this process. Grades One through Four focused on the home, the school, the neighborhood, and the town. By the time students reached Grades Five and Six, the subject of study was “the nation as a whole.” The authors placed particular emphasis on patriotism, “because this is the central duty of citizenship.” Love of country and a duty to serve were instilled through lessons on “American ideas: honesty, sympathy, courtesy, industry, courage, self-control, reverence, a sacred regard for truth.” Cabot promised that Grade Seven would show that “a citizen of the United States … has peculiar obligations in strengthening the ties of human brotherhood,” and that Grade Eight would center on the processes that were “making the world one great family.” The course ended, Cabot concluded, “with suggestions as to how each one of us can link his individual life to the life of the whole through good will and active service.”Footnote 22
The emphasis on education for world citizenship was implicit rather than explicit in Grades One through Six. The authors stressed living in harmony with others in one's community. General lessons on kindness, good manners, perseverance, and honesty were interwoven, for example, with ones on “working together,” “peace among neighbors,” and “good will among all communities.”Footnote 23 The poems and stories the authors used to illustrate various lessons frequently featured characters from other countries. McSkimmon used a story about a French boy's kindness to a neighbor to illustrate good manners and sympathy, while Cabot used a poem about children in Norway to illustrate hospitality. References to international cooperation became slightly more pronounced in Grades Five and Six. Cabot included in Grade Five a chapter on “friendship with other nations,” which included discussions of French cooperation during the American Revolution, Samuel Gridley Howe's service in the Greek Revolution, and the laying of the transatlantic cable.Footnote 24
Thus far, it is easy to see how A Course in Citizenship manifested many prevailing trends in Progressive Era education. Andrews had degrees in both education and psychology and was a member of the NEA; she would have been well aware of contemporary developments in social studies education, including the work of the Committee of Ten and of the Committee of Seven, although she was less interested in the teaching of history, specifically, and more interested in the teaching of citizenship.Footnote 25 The format of A Course in Citizenship indicates she was also familiar with the “expanding environments” curriculum as it developed after 1900.Footnote 26 She followed closely the model as it was laid out in Arthur William Dunn's The Community and the Citizen, which began by teaching children about citizenship within their homes and families and moved outward to their town, city, and nation.Footnote 27 Most significantly, the ASPL capitalized on the growing concern in the early twentieth century for educating children to be responsible, active citizens, evident especially in the growth of civics education. As Tracy Steffes has shown, proponents hoped civics curricula would “not only help Americanize immigrants, but also combat what they saw as apathy of native-born citizens, who just needed to be awakened to their responsibilities.”Footnote 28 In 1915, a special committee of the NEA defined a “good citizen … as a person who habitually conducts himself with proper regard for the welfare of the communities of which he is a member, and who is active and intelligent in his cooperation with his fellow members to that end.”Footnote 29
The ASPL also embraced child-centered pedagogy and experiential learning over passive learning and the rote memorization of information. At every grade level, the authors emphasized learning activities that would make the lessons come alive for the children. In her introduction, for instance, Cabot encouraged teachers to rely on reading, storytelling, and dramatization, especially in the lower grades. “All children love stories,” she contended. “A moral alone is sharp and bitter as a salt without soup, but a moral shaken and stirred into a genuinely good story adds flavor the child himself appreciates.” Likewise, almost every grade included a list of “suggestions for morning talks,” most of which encouraged children to think about how a particular lesson applied to their own lives. Grade Two's lesson on helpfulness, for instance, emphasized things children could do in their school to be helpful, including “being in your own seat promptly every session … keeping your books and tools all in good order … helping a playmate learn a lesson that was harder for him than for you.”Footnote 30 In Grade Five, Cabot proclaimed that “lessons in citizenship must go hand in hand with the concrete practice of citizenship. There should be no emotion without action.”Footnote 31 A Course in Citizenship embraced John Dewey's vision of the school as “an embryonic community,” not separate from the world around it but an integral part of that world. “When the school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little community,” Dewey argued in 1900, “saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious.”Footnote 32
What set A Course in Citizenship apart from its contemporaries was Andrews's emphasis on internationalism. Early “expanding environments” curricula, like Dunn's or those propounded by Charles McMurry, stopped at the water's edge.Footnote 33 But for the ASPL, Grade Seven on “The United States and the World,” and Grade Eight on “The World Family”—both written by Andrews—were the linchpin. This was where Andrews took the standard lessons about citizenship and goodwill and expanded them beyond the boundaries of the nation. Grade Seven began by uncovering the truly international character of the United States. “The object in this grade,” Andrews wrote, “is to throw light on those elements of our civilization which can be traced back to ancient and medieval life; to point out the motives for discovery and colonization; and to show how all these seeds, taking root in American soil, developed the Republic of the United States. … Since the birth of the Union, its life has been intertwined with world movements.”Footnote 34 From Greek principles of democracy and Roman respect for law and order, to the English parliamentary system and Iberian advances in navigation and exploration, Andrews showed how other peoples had “planted” their character in the New World. In the nineteenth century, immigrants likewise lent their character to the developing United States, ensuring that love of liberty and a dedication to hard work helped shape the American character. Students also learned how these influences in turn allowed the United States to exercise its benevolent influence in Japan, China, and the Philippines through commerce and Protestant missions.
The mention of immigrants marked another significant point of departure from other Progressive Era curricula. At a time when white, native-born Americans were growing increasingly wary of the vast numbers of immigrants pouring into the country, especially those from southern and eastern Europe, A Course in Citizenship took special pains to emphasize the contributions of other peoples and cultures to American life. Andrews included in Grade Seven a chapter on “The United States as a Melting-Pot for Races,” and “The United States and the World's Culture,” in which she encouraged teachers to celebrate the lives of immigrants. “Emphasize the life of Carl Schurz as an exemplary American citizen,” she suggested, referring to the German revolutionary who fled Prussia in 1848 and eventually became a US senator. “Point out the chief events of his career as scholar, journalist, soldier, statesman. Tell of his great devotion to American ideals.”Footnote 35 She outlined contributions in art, literature, science, philosophy, and other fields from which Americans had benefited. “Culture knows no nationality,” she argued, “it influences men's minds contemporaneously over the whole civilized world. In thought and culture the world is continually drawing closer together.”Footnote 36
Grade Eight, “The World Family,” represented for Andrews the culmination of the entire curriculum and the centerpiece of her argument for world citizenship. “The eighth grade introduces a somewhat new conception of citizenship,” she explained, “and deals with the larger social group, the world. Here, the purpose is to show that civilization progresses only by the mutual assistance of all nations, each making its peculiar contribution. The course leads to an appreciation of all these efforts, explains the various agencies which have developed to make the world a family of nations, and develops the thought that good will is the fundamental principle in the promotion of international harmony—the necessary condition for the highest development of the world.”Footnote 37 In this chapter Andrews emphasized the commonalities among all human beings, the contributions each nation had made to the world, the interdependence of nations, and the growth of international laws and treaties. She celebrated technological innovations like the printing press, the compass, the steam engine, the telegraph, and the telephone, all of which connected distant parts of the world and showed “how the investigations of a man in one country contribute to the good of mankind in all countries.”Footnote 38 She praised humanitarian efforts like the Red Cross, which proved to her that “above all nations is humanity … even in time of war.”Footnote 39 She drew students’ attention to the growth of international trade and commerce, the postal service, and travel. Above all, she surveyed the disastrous effects of war and emphasized the positive impact of international law. She explored in more depth the results of the Hague Conferences and the benefits of arbitration, arguing that “the key to world peace is how to end a dispute before war begins.”Footnote 40 She lauded the founding of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, calling it the “world umpire.”Footnote 41
Throughout her two chapters, Andrews also stressed the need for the United States to take a leading role in fostering international cooperation and world citizenship. The combination of its natural advantages and influences from other countries gave the United States a unique character, she contended. In a section on “The United States in the Napoleonic Period,” for example, she discussed the influence of European philosophies on Thomas Jefferson alongside the rise of the “new Western spirit, which prompted the Lewis and Clark Expedition.” The confluence of these factors led Andrews to a classic formulation of American exceptionalism. “Founded on the idea of democracy,” she proclaimed, “which makes every person responsible for the common good, the United States is distinctly the nation which can extend the idea of human brotherhood throughout the world.”Footnote 42 Furthermore, the success of federalism in the United States could serve as a model for international cooperation: “The principle of federalism implies a desire to live together peacefully; in it we see the seeds of permanent peace between nations.” Thus, according to Andrews, “by its history and tradition the United States has a peculiar mission to perform in becoming the leader in this advancement of world civilization.”Footnote 43
Andrews and her coauthors’ innovation in A Course in Citizenship was to bring their focus on internationalism and peace education to bear on emerging trends in social studies and civics education. The ASPL was the only major peace organization during this period that devoted serious attention to elementary schoolchildren, and it was among the earliest to emphasize world citizenship to such an extent, especially within the context of “expanding environments.” Andrews and her colleagues took prevalent notions about child-centered learning and the need for more active citizenship education and blended them with the growing trends toward international arbitration and peaceful cooperation among nations.Footnote 44 For Andrews, educating the children of the United States to be conscious world citizens was the best contribution she could make to the larger peace movement. The lessons of A Course in Citizenship, she concluded, would show the student that “by his doing what he can toward bringing the world into a closer community of interest he is not only working to the great advantage of his own nation, but also to the advantage of the family of nations and of the people of the world themselves, who must advance together toward the desired end of a fuller life, actuated by the principles of justice.”Footnote 45 Over time, then, education for world citizenship would lead inevitably to peace.
Education for Pax Americana
Andrews's belief in American superiority sheds light on the more problematic lessons of A Course in Citizenship. From the moment she took the reins as the principal author in Grade Seven, she wasted no time in establishing an exceptionalist view of American history, replete with references to progress, civilization, and manifest destiny: “With its historical background and unique mixture of peoples, the United States is peculiarly fitted to take a leading part in world activity. … This is especially true in those movements of civilization which are guided by the principles of liberty and justice. World brotherhood is but the expansion of American faith. The realization of our ideals will keep pace with our conception of the special mission of the United States in the progress of civilization.”Footnote 46 As other historians have pointed out, such views enjoyed widespread popularity among white, native-born elites at the turn of the century. In the years before World War I, many progressives like Andrews believed that the United States represented the pinnacle of modern society against which all other nations and peoples should be measured. The combination of industrialization, mass immigration, and US territorial expansion overseas resulted in a potent American nationalism that shaped much of the United States’ engagement with the world in the twentieth century.Footnote 47
Andrews and her colleagues saw themselves as educating children for peace, but they were educating them for a particular kind of peace—one established on American terms, measured by American standards, and maintained through American leadership. Children learned that the United States was not just the model of behavior; it was the universal model of progress, industry, democracy, and justice. In the same way that citizenship education implicitly imagined the white, native-born American as the ideal member of society, the ASPL's world citizenship education imagined white, native-born Americans not only as the ideal members of world society—and as the proper leaders of that society—but as the standard by which all other people should be judged. In other words—in Andrews's words, specifically—the United States was the apex and the model of “civilization,” destined to help civilize others. Alan Dawley characterizes this belief as a “messianic form of American nationalism,” driven by a conviction that America had “a God-given mission of redemption.”Footnote 48 Andrews's mission was to redeem the world from war.
The establishment of Americans as the natural leaders of the new world order demanded first that the authors of A Course in Citizenship define who was really American and who was not. Throughout the text, in their discussions of goodwill toward “others,” of fair treatment for “others,” and even of diversity and of tolerance for “others,” the authors imagined their audience as white and native-born. While emphasizing the contributions of immigrants to American life, the curriculum presented them as a group clearly separate from those born on US soil. And when the contributions of African or Native Americans were discussed at all, it was in such a way that distinguished them as a group separate from white Americans.
Although Andrews was the first of the coauthors to discuss extensively the contributions of immigrants, her Grade Seven was not the first chapter in which they were mentioned. In Grade Four, children were encouraged to welcome new members of their community and to show respect to “foreign-born children—never say, ‘He's Irish,’ or ‘He's Greek.’”Footnote 49 This admonition presumed, of course, that there were no foreign-born children in the very classrooms receiving this lesson. Grade Five included a lesson on “The Contribution of Each Race to American Life,” which encouraged discussion of Germans, French, Irish, Italians, and Greeks. “American life is made rich and fruitful by the gifts and service of many nationalities,” wrote Cabot; “It is the privilege of teachers to help children feel how much each race has brought to the United States from its past in other lands, and how much each has contributed and can contribute here. Thus the contact of different races can cease to be a source of contention and scorn and become a source of strength and blessing.”Footnote 50 Andrews's Grade Seven included detailed discussions of immigration to the United States over the course of the nineteenth century. “In fact,” she wrote, “through the great streams of immigration, Europeans have played a large part in developing our resources and in molding our national ideals.”Footnote 51 All the authors, it is worth noting, discussed immigrants as if they came only from Europe. Asians or Asian Americans, for instance, were never mentioned.Footnote 52
The authors were careful to make clear that no matter where they were born, all of these newcomers were now Americans and should not only be considered as such but should consider themselves as such. Coe's chapter on “American ideals” listed among those ideals “courage in the face of difficulties, loyalty to truth, sympathy and courtesy, industry and reverence to God and to one's fellowmen.” She then went on: “These ideals must become the heritage not only of every American-born child, but of every alien as well. They will soon become rulers with the fate of a great democracy in their hands.”Footnote 53 In Grade Seven, Andrews drew attention to “our homogeneous citizenship, composed of so many heterogeneous elements.”Footnote 54 While she recognized the disparate elements that made up American identity, she still expected all people within the United States to embrace that singular identity. However, this was not “100 percent Americanism,” in which immigrants were pressured to give up all traces of their ancestry. In her introduction to Grade Five, Cabot pointed out, “Within our great nation are many newcomers from the Old World. All of us are Americans. Yet, from its varying past, each race has something of its own to offer as a special gift.”Footnote 55 Even though they did not have to give up their heritage, immigrants did need to embrace their new one alongside it.
There was almost no discussion of black people at all. Slavery was mentioned only in the context of white benevolence—Abraham Lincoln served as an example of pity toward slaves and of kindness in emancipating them; European Christians became a model of bravery in outlawing slavery in “civilized” nations. In a lesson for Grade Four on “Good Will Among All Classes of Citizens,” Hill included as an example cooperation between “black and white … faithful slaves in Hayti, [and] Ayahs in India in the Sepoy Rebellion.”Footnote 56 The former, of course, referred to the small number of Haitians who rejected the violent overthrow of French colonial slavery, while the latter referred to women servants who stayed loyal to their British employers during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The unstated lesson here was that only loyal, obedient black people and people of color were worthy of consideration by white, Euro-American schoolchildren. Perhaps the most telling passage was the following short one. Toward the end of Grade Five's lesson on “The Contribution of Each Race to American Life,” as suggestions for further reading, Cabot listed chapter 2 of Booker T. Washington's memoir Up from Slavery and Phoebe Cary's poem “Ready,” about a black sailor during the Civil War who sacrificed his life for his (largely white) crew. Immediately following these two entries, Cabot wrote: “Through the appeal of these stories the children themselves will be led to honor, understand, and treat kindly any foreigners they may meet.”Footnote 57 She thus marked all black people as foreign.
Native Americans were also considered foreigners, though given their complicated legal status in 1914—most were not US citizens until 1924—this was perhaps less surprising. Grade Two's introduction to “foreign cultures” included a story about “The Forgiving Indian,” who took pity on a lost white hunter, sheltered him for the night, and escorted him home. The Indian then revealed to the hunter that he had been to the hunter's house before and chided him, “When an Indian calls on you again, hungry and thirsty, do not say, ‘Begone, you Indian dog!’”Footnote 58 This lesson fit with the chapter's emphasis on treating foreigners kindly. Cabot's chapter on “The Contribution of Each Race to American Life” included a mention of Native Americans: “The oldest race in the United States is the Indian. Tell of their self-control and courage; their friendship with William Penn.”Footnote 59 Several chapters included references to stereotypical stories about how Indians helped the Pilgrims celebrate the first Thanksgiving, or about how Sacagawea and others guided Lewis and Clark. But they were always treated as a group separate from white US Americans.
These implicit lessons about the distinctions between whites and nonwhites, US-born and foreign-born, also had important implications beyond pupils’ classrooms and communities. Andrews and her colleagues’ notions about education and progress were closely tied to the ideologies of US foreign policy in the early twentieth century. In the wake of the War of 1898, the United States saw itself as the paternalistic guardian of “backward” nations like the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Between 1898 and 1902, the United States waged a bloody war of pacification against Filipinos in the name of restoring order and bringing civilization to the islands. Over the next twenty years, the United States further imposed its authority on various countries in Central America and the Caribbean. As Paul Kramer and others have argued, the United States believed it could shepherd foreign peoples toward modernity by imposing US forms of governance, law, economics, and social behavior, including education. Education, for many in the United States, was the ultimate civilizer.Footnote 60
The lessons of A Course in Citizenship that centered on attitudes and behaviors—obedience, kindness, orderliness—had ramifications within this imperial context. US policymakers and observers tended to rely on observations about character when assessing the “fitness” of other nations for self-government. For instance, in 1901, Michigan Republican Edgar Weeks, on a Congressional “sightseeing” trip to Manila, asserted that the true measure of Filipino capacity for self-government was to be found in the home. One must “see if his house is orderly and neat, if good books and papers are read by him and if his family is well cared for.” By this measure, Weeks argued, “Not ten thousand of the Filipinos are fit for self government and not one percent of the population are intelligent enough to take part in it.”Footnote 61 According to Weeks, only very narrow standards were acceptable for judging the fitness of non-Americans for independence.
Gratitude could serve as one such standard. In Grade Two, McSkimmon suggested that as part of one of their morning talks students learn that “for every gift or kindness we receive, we ought to show kindness in return by look and word and deed. This is gratitude.” The lesson instructed children not only to say “thank you” when someone else did something for them, but to show their gratitude through their actions and behaviors. “Do you know,” McSkimmon suggested teachers ask students, “that if you are truly grateful to your mother and your teacher you will not only say, ‘Thank you,’ but you will try in every way to please them?”Footnote 62 The lesson included stories of children and animals who illustrated proper demonstrations of gratitude.
As Louis A. Pérez has shown, gratitude played a significant role in the United States’ relationship with Cuba following the War of 1898. The United States saw itself as having liberated Cuba from Spain, its imperial oppressor, and expected in return that Cubans would be properly grateful. In the popular narratives that emerged immediately after the war, the United States became the “explicitly selfless and self-denying” liberator that had gifted Cubans their independence. These accounts of the war “served to insinuate gratitude as a source of binding reciprocity, simultaneously a source of moral entitlement and means of social control by which to transact assumptions of domination.”Footnote 63 When Cubans bristled and even rebelled at the imposition of political, economic, and military restrictions by the United States, they were deemed ungrateful. Very quickly “gratitude became a measure of civility and civilization, a standard by which to assess fitness for self-government, the absence of which cast larger doubts about Cuban capacity for independence.”Footnote 64 A Course in Citizenship thus provided US schoolchildren with the proper barometer by which to judge the behavior of various people outside the United States. The fact that Cubans did not “appreciate” what the United States had done for them by winning their independence from Spain was a clear sign to anyone schooled by the ASPL that they were not properly grateful, and thus not deserving of the gift the United States had given them. The ASPL curriculum served in this instance to reinforce and to legitimize existing popular narratives about the role of the United States in Cuba.
Like many progressive reformers of her time, Andrews also frequently used the rhetoric of “civilization” to establish a schema of human development. She believed that human beings progressed in a gradual, linear fashion from early stages of ignorance to more “enlightened” stages marked by industry, capitalism, and liberal democracy.Footnote 65 Through her use of this rhetoric, Andrews encouraged white US schoolchildren to consider themselves the pinnacle of human development, and to measure all others according to the standards of what she called “American civilization.” This positioning of the United States as the clear leader in human advancement also made plain its role as the desired leader toward world peace—a peace which would in turn be modeled on the development of the United States.
Andrews plotted different nations and peoples on her development schematic according to environmental theories of racial progress. She did not believe that one group of people was inherently less capable of development than another; rather, she argued that climate, geography, and circumstance had allowed some groups to develop sooner than others. In tracing the history of European influence on the United States, she noted that in medieval and early modern England “the climate gave vigor to the people, and the mixture of races that had come in earlier days made a nation of men with great mental and physical power.”Footnote 66 To open the lesson on “The Influence of the United States on Asia and Africa” in Grade Seven, Andrews used a stanza from John Greenleaf Whittier's “The Cable Hymn”: “Through Orient seas, o'er Afric's plain / And Asian mountains borne, / The vigor of the Northern brain / Shall nerve the world outworn.”Footnote 67 For Andrews, the “Northern brain” meant the United States and western Europe; she subscribed to beliefs common at the time that those who lived in more vigorous climates were superior to those who lived in warmer climates that induced laziness and sloth. Thus, due to climate and geography, the United States was superior to Asia (by which Andrews meant China and Japan) and Africa.
By virtue of its historical development, therefore, the United States was uniquely positioned to “help” other nations achieve similar progress. Andrews cited evidence from the United States’ leadership role in the nineteenth century. The Monroe Doctrine was an “announcement” to the world “that this country was not only a land of liberty but a protector of liberty. … Thus we see the people of the United States, with almost unanimous voice, proclaiming themselves the guardians of the New World.”Footnote 68 In Japan, Commodore Matthew Perry successfully “convinced the Japanese that the appliances of their old civilization were powerless to resist those of the new, and that her isolation shut her off from all the wonders of Western progress.” And in China, Andrews claimed, “The United States has always maintained the attitude of an older brother toward China, and on several important occasions has rendered her valuable protection against European aggrandizement.”Footnote 69 This positioning of the United States as the historic guardian and protector of less “developed” people and nations around the world not only fit well within the rhetoric of manifest destiny and civilization, it also established a precedent for justifying the United States’ leadership role in the early twentieth century.
Andrews's key marker of civilization, however, was not resorting to force to settle disputes. A nation's willingness to adopt negotiation and arbitration—the ideals of the Hague movement—marked that nation's progress and preparedness for participation in the world system. Andrews wrote in the League's second annual report:
The idea has become common all over the world that the progress of a nation is intricately connected with the growth and life of other countries, and that precisely as the civilized individual no longer relies on the duel or the street fight to procure for himself the rights and privileges that justice demands, so nations should have recourse not to force, but to reason, not to armies and navies, but to international tribunals. This new spirit, which may well be described by the term “internationalism,” is establishing new ideals among the peoples of the world, forcing new economic standards, and developing on the part of each and every nation political responsibility for the welfare of the world at large.Footnote 70
Efforts to further the growth of world peace and the use of international arbitration were thus integral to Andrews's definition of civilization and progress. By this measure, nations like the Philippines and Cuba marked themselves as uncivilized simply by resisting US imperialism. The fact that they not only rejected benevolent American assistance but used force to do so, violated all the standards the United States had erected to measure their capacity for independence. As the New York Times noted shortly after the outbreak of the US-Filipino war in 1899, “The Filipinos have chosen a bloody way to demonstrate their incapacity for self-government, but it has been effectual.”Footnote 71
The message that the United States would, and should, lead the way to a peaceful world was woven both implicitly and explicitly throughout A Course in Citizenship. The book's very structure made inevitable the conclusion that the world was simply an expansion of the United States. By beginning with the home and community and expanding outward to the nation and the world, the book's lessons ensured that children would spend two full years, in Grades Five and Six, studying and discussing the national achievements and ideals of the United States before moving on to the rest of the world in Grades Seven and Eight. In her chapters Andrews made sure to drive the point home, positioning the United States as a beacon of progress and civilization—not only the ideal model for other nations of the world, but the only country that could be trusted to lead the new world order.
This contrast between the desire for internationalism and the desire for American dominance became more pronounced in the second edition of the curriculum, revised and reissued in 1918 as A Course in Citizenship and Patriotism. During the intervening war years, Andrews doubled down on the need for US leadership in the postwar world order. In Grades Seven and Eight, especially, Andrews elided any critiques of militarism in favor of emphasizing the need for justice, law, and order. She deleted or modified all references to Germany that might have been seen as positive. And she went from paying lip service to the idea of America as a model for other nations to explicitly proclaiming America as the leader the rest of the world should follow. In the 1914 edition, the United States was one among many. “Although we must admit,” Andrews wrote in Grade Seven, “that the United States has not always been true to her ideals, the great fact remains that the world holds us to our obligations; and it behooves each and every citizen to throw his energy into the upbuilding of the nation so that it shall be faithful to its mission of civilization.” She followed this statement with several questions for classroom discussion, the first of which was, “What forces are tending to make the whole civilized world a great melting-pot?”Footnote 72 In the 1918 edition, by contrast, the United States stood alone: “The program of civilization is our program. … In this hour of test, we should maintain the American ideal of democracy, so that on the pages of the world's history, the United States will stand out as a nation which remained true to its purpose in the service of humanity.” The first discussion question that followed now became: “How would American ideals benefit the world?”Footnote 73 Any pretense to the idea that the United States was one contributor among many to “world civilization”—even a principle contributor—had been replaced by an assertion of the right and the obligation of the United States to lead the postwar world. Andrews supported wholeheartedly Woodrow Wilson's vision for a League of Nations and saw it as a natural extension of American federalism. From her perspective, the need for a Pax Americana was even stronger in 1918 than it had been in 1914.Footnote 74
By 1918, of course, Andrews also had to take into account the domestic forces arrayed against anything that hinted at pacifism or internationalism. The social context in which A Course in Citizenship and Patriotism appeared in 1918 was markedly different than that which had greeted the original version before the war. Anti-immigrant nativism had increased; tolerance for dissent had decreased. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution cast a sinister shadow on the word international. And the defense of peace or pacifism was now suspect, assumed to be a mark of weakness at best, and communism at worst. Educating children about peace and cooperation, the thinking ran, would make them unwilling to bear arms in defense of their nation, which in turn was a sure sign that they were traitors and no longer patriots. In this light, Andrews's decisions to omit the handful of references to antimilitarism, to assert more strongly the leadership of the United States, and even to change the title are more easily understandable. In June 1919, upon arriving home from the Versailles Conference, she wrote to the members of her executive board that they needed a new name for their organization: “The word ‘peace’ is inappropriate, I think, at the present time.” The group became the American School Citizenship League, its object redefined as the development “of an American citizenship which will promote a responsible world democracy and a real cooperation among the nations.”Footnote 75 Any mention of peace had entirely disappeared.
Conclusion
Fannie Fern Andrews's goal was to implement peace education in elementary and intermediate schools across the country. Inspired by the Hague Conferences, she wanted to educate children in the principles of international cooperation and the peaceful settlement of disputes in order to create a generation of world citizens and to permanently end war. To achieve those ends, she founded the American School Peace League and recruited a team of editors to produce A Course in Citizenship. By instilling lessons about kindness, respect, and tolerance, Andrews and her coauthors saw themselves preparing future global citizens for life in an increasingly interconnected world. Even as late as the spring of 1914, the idea that the nations of the world could organize themselves into some sort of system that would forestall violent conflicts and ensure continued peace seemed very much a possibility.
At the same time, however, their vision was clearly a Pax Americana. They were preparing white, native-born US children to lead the new world and to judge others’ capacity for membership in it—their fitness for world citizenship—according to “civilized,” white American standards. At a time when the United States was not only dealing with record levels of immigration but also grappling with the potential incorporation of millions of nonwhite Filipinos, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and others into its sphere of influence, the perceived need to bolster civilized white authority was palpable. While Andrews and the ASPL professed a desire for internationalism, theirs was very much a US-dominated internationalism, designed not so much to promote equal exchange and cooperation as to educate the world about American ideals.
Like Woodrow Wilson, Andrews was disappointed by events after the war. The failure of the United States to join the League of Nations marked the beginning of the end of the American School Citizenship League. After so firm a rejection of the international system, the League's arguments for world citizenship education no longer resonated. Andrews kept up the League's activities, particularly its popular essay contest for high school and normal school students, until the late 1920s, but by 1930 the organization existed only on paper. Andrews herself embarked on a new stage in her career: she earned a PhD in international relations from Harvard in 1923 and went on to study the League of Nations mandate system in the Middle East.
But the underlying message of A Course in Citizenship prevailed. The ideas toward “others” promulgated in the curriculum resonated well into the twentieth century. After World War I, for example (and especially after World War II), rhetoric about “civilization” was gradually replaced by the language of “development.” In the context of decolonization and the Cold War, a nation's desire for capitalism and democracy was seen as a marker of its status. Likewise, the notion persisted throughout the century that the United States, as the exceptionalist model of liberal democracy, was best suited to lead the world—though, of course, that idea did not go unchallenged.
