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SCHOOLS ON PARADE: PATRIOTISM AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF URBAN EDUCATION AT THE DAWN OF THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 January 2017

Cody Dodge Ewert
Cody Dodge Ewert*
Affiliation:
New York University
*
cody.ewert@nyu.edu
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Abstract

As the scope and power of public school systems across the United States grew during the Progressive Era, so too did a popular belief that mass education could solve the major social and political problems of the day. This in part owes to school reformers’ efforts to frame public education as an inherently patriotic institution that if properly supported could move the nation forward while preserving its history and traditions. Their efforts centered on the Columbian School Celebration, a nationwide school parade corresponding with the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas. A case study focusing on a key place and time in this movement's history––Brooklyn, New York, in the early 1890s––this article explores how progressive educators in Brooklyn both used patriotism as a rhetorical device to excite popular support and proclaimed it the cornerstone of the modern urban schools they hoped to build. In so doing, it helps explain both the rise of large urban school systems and growing salience of educational matters in twentieth-century politics.

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Articles
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The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , January 2017, pp. 65 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2017 

Nearly a half million revelers swarmed Brooklyn's Prospect Park on October 21, 1892. Defying police attempts to corral this “dense and widespread throng,” as the New York Times described, the crowd rushed toward a temporary speaking stand on the park's northwest corner to witness the official dedication of a memorial honoring the city's Civil War veterans. The spectators––including former president and then presidential candidate Grover Cleveland––gazed up at Brooklyn's Soldiers and Sailors Monument, an archway reportedly larger than any except the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. The monument's “grand and noble proportions,” reported the Times, elicited “a mighty wave of patriotic cheers, which moved from stand to stand, and was echoed and re-echoed until lost in the great ampitheatre [sic] of humanity at the foot of the arch.” The ceremony began with 600 high school boys singing “America.” The evening's featured speaker, Presbyterian minister and famed moral crusader T. DeWitt Talmage, then reminded the audience that this celebration of the nation's Civil War heroes coincided with the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas. Talmage asked, “What two sublimer thoughts can you find than America discovered and America redeemed?” Certainly, few icons loomed larger in the nation's public memory than its recent generation of war heroes and the explorer who many felt had set the stage for American development. Yet the New York Times reserved its highest praise neither for the monument nor the hundreds of Civil War veterans in attendance. Rather, the Times reflected, “it was left for the division of the public schools of Brooklyn … to create the greatest impression.”Footnote 1

The crowd converging on Prospect Park had already witnessed a stirring patriotic performance. Indeed, this ceremony merely concluded a massive parade in which over 10,000 Brooklyn public school students––like countless children in cities and towns across the nation––took to the streets. That this spectacle coincided with the Columbian quadricentennial and the dedication of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument was no accident. It was also not merely fortuitous that the press lauded the Brooklyn students’ performance. Rather, the parade achieved exactly what its organizers had hoped: it positioned the public schools as a symbol of national greatness on par with America's sanctified heroes, suggesting that popular support for public education could secure the glorious future many claimed was within the nation's reach.

This article examines reformers' publicity campaigns for public schools in Brooklyn, New York, a city whose educational leaders looked to set an example for the entire nation. It explores early progressive school reformers’ use of patriotic rhetoric and performance, suggesting such efforts spurred the rise of modern urban school systems.Footnote 2 Patriotic thought in the Progressive Era drew on both visions of civic rebirth and fears of moral degeneration.Footnote 3 Seizing on such visions, reformers advertised the public schools as both a forward-looking force for change and a vital part of America's heritage, in the process allaying many citizens’ concerns about the nation's future. Scholarship on progressive education, however, has largely ignored the question of how a diverse and diffuse population came to terms with the growing power of their schools during the Progressive Era. Early studies of the movement stress school reformers’ democratic aims, declaring it a grand humanitarian initiative. A wave of revisionist scholarship challenged this interpretation, emphasizing the role of businessmen, elites seeking social control, and status-hungry professionals in creating modern schools. Later historians complicated this top-down narrative by arguing that a wide range of grassroots reformers fought to expand public schools’ power. Recent work casts the growth of American education as nothing less than a massive state-building project, the nation's chief response to the Progressive Era's pressing social and economic questions.Footnote 4 Yet why so many average citizens rallied around rapidly expanding and centralizing school systems in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century remains unexplained. By exploring reformers’ efforts to generate public interest through patriotic appeals, this article helps uncover not only how modern schools developed, but also how educational matters came to assume such a prominent role in twentieth-century American politics.

American schooling changed dramatically over the course of the Progressive Era. Citizens contributed escalating amounts of tax dollars to their schools, with state and local governments allocating nearly a quarter of all funds to public education by the mid-twentieth century. By then most Americans attended public high schools and kindergartens, institutions that scarcely existed in the late nineteenth century. While Americans directed increasing attention to schools in the early twentieth century, however, Western European governments developed a variety of other state-sponsored institutions and social programs aiming to ameliorate the problems associated with industrialization and urbanization.Footnote 5 Countless scholars have explored the gulf between American progressives’ utopian ambitions and their often-limited social visions. In the process of pondering the roads not taken during these years, however, historians have failed to explore why so many citizens came to believe that popular education could solve the era's problems.Footnote 6

At a time when many fretted about the nation's lack of social cohesion, school reformers claimed universal education could help create a shared identity and revitalize American democracy.Footnote 7 Offering average citizens and their children a key position in a grassroots movement, they told Americans that the nation's path to glory rested not in the halls of power in Washington, D.C., but inside its public schools. In the process, they declared patriotism a vital component of a proper education. Brooklyn public school students’ own writings demonstrate they at least learned to produce convincing reproductions of the era's patriotic discourse. School curricula had a patriotic flair since the early nineteenth century, as the hero worship in texts like the ubiquitous McGuffey Reader suggests, but turn-of-the-century lessons brimmed with distinctly modern and often highly racialized notions about what it meant to be an American.Footnote 8 Courses like geography and history––and, beginning in 1916, social studies––moved from deifying individual heroes to heralding the nation's institutional development. Conflating nation and race, this thinking shaped the rise of Jim Crow in the South, Indian policy on the erstwhile frontier, and the nation's imperial ventures in 1898.Footnote 9 Yet patriotism was not just another school lesson; it was the key political argument for the Progressive Era school itself.Footnote 10 In an age of new political divisions marked by competing interest groups and amid unprecedented immigration and urbanization, reformers declared the school the only institution capable of protecting and even perfecting an older vision of a united, democratic public while moving the nation into the twentieth century.Footnote 11

SPREADING “AMERICAN IDEAS”: THE CASE FOR REFORMING BROOKLYN'S SCHOOLS

In the early 1890s, few figured that public schools would become the nation's preferred means of addressing social problems for the next half century. Indeed, some worried public schools might not even remain the chief means of educating the nation's youth. In January 1892, New York Governor Roswell Pettibone Flower, citing the state superintendent of public instruction's annual report, warned the state legislature that out of New York's 1,821,773 school-aged children, only 1,054,044 attended public schools. Further, the percentage of children in public schools had dropped in recent years. Reversing this trend, Flower argued, was vital for both the state and the nation: “It is to the American ideas implanted in our youth in the common schools that our country owes her prosperity in the past and must look for the preservation of her institutions in the future. Every schoolhouse may be made a stronghold of defense against the spread of socialistic and un-American ideas.” Flower argued the state had to bring more students––especially those from immigrant families––into the public schools. This was not a novel suggestion. A generation of educators agreed that strengthening the public schools required positioning them as centers for teaching so-called American ideas.Footnote 12

In Brooklyn, the second largest city in the state and the third largest in the nation, the task of making sure students received these invaluable lessons fell to William H. Maxwell, the city's superintendent of public instruction. A prominent figure in urban progressive education, Maxwell began a long tenure as superintendent of New York City's schools following Brooklyn's annexation in 1898. Throughout his career, like many of the era's business-minded progressive reformers, Maxwell fought to centralize control of the city's schools. Yet he also championed public kindergartens, high schools, and manual training schools, while working to reduce overcrowding, raise teachers’ pay, and update the city's facilities.Footnote 13 Maxwell's efforts blended efficiency-minded organizational reforms and pedagogically progressive notions of child-centered learning. While many of the era's educators identified with only one of these conflicting approaches, nearly all of them shared Maxwell's belief that the fate of the school and the nation were intertwined.Footnote 14

In pushing to bring more children into Brooklyn's schools, the city added space for 6,000 new students in 1890 and 1891. By 1892, the city had nine new school buildings under construction, each containing 173 classrooms and accommodations for over 9,000 children, including two public high schools, Boys’ High School and Girls’ High School. While Brooklyn had no public secondary schools at the beginning of Maxwell's tenure in the mid-1880s, by 1898 it had four extremely popular and perennially overcrowded public high schools.Footnote 15 City leaders felt the growing size and scope of the city's school system, as Mayor David A. Brody claimed in a speech marking the opening of Girls’ High School, proved Brooklyn “progressive in the matter of education,” and positioned the city at the national vanguard. Indeed, the city spent over $1,700,000 for a population of roughly one million in 1892, a huge jump from $375,000 for 300,000 citizens a quarter century earlier.Footnote 16

Yet the city's leaders worried that some Brooklynites, particularly the city's rising immigrant population, would ignore these efforts and refuse to send their children to school. To both assert the schools’ authority and hasten immigrants’ assimilation, they began enforcing the state's compulsory attendance law, passed in 1874 but invoked only sporadically. In the late 1880s, Brooklyn began employing a cadre of attendance officers and the city's police force to guarantee students’ and parents’ compliance. Between 1888 and 1892, the city's police reported 1,925 cases of truancy, an average of nearly 400 a year. By 1893, however, the city reported only 212 truants alongside a rise in attendance, indicating their efforts indeed induced families and children to follow the letter of the law. In so doing, attendance officers disproportionately targeted the city's poor immigrant families. In 1892 Maxwell reported that among the 1,089 students the city forcibly placed in schools, 72 percent were immigrants, most of German or Irish descent with a slightly lower number representing new arrivals from Italy and Poland. Maxwell concluded that “If the foreigners congregating in our large cities, often in colonies that preserve the native customs and language, are to be converted into American citizens, able to judge conscientiously and intelligently of men and of measures, compulsory education is necessary.”Footnote 17 Similarly, as the president of Brooklyn's board of education, Joseph C. Hendrix, claimed in an 1892 speech regarding the “swarms” of Poles and Russian Jews entering the city, “Their children must be taken care of by the public.” The public schools, he argued, were the only institution up to this task: “these people come in, and they bring their moral diseases––as deadly as any physical ailment––with them. The only quarantine that will avail against this is the school, erected and maintained by the tax and the bounty of the people.” These statements exploited Anglo-Saxon Brooklynites’ concerns about the city's changing demographics while assuring them that the solution to these perceived problems was simple. Ordinary citizens, Brooklyn educators claimed, could secure America's future by supporting the public schools.Footnote 18

A PATRIOTIC MOVEMENT: PLOTTING A NATIONAL SCHOOL CELEBRATION

Brooklyn's reformers strove to stake their city's claim as home to the nation's most cutting-edge educational work. This flurry of activity occurred just as Brooklyn welcomed the annual meeting of the NEA's Department of Superintendence in February 1892.Footnote 19 The decision for Brooklyn to host came down at the previous year's session in Philadelphia, in part thanks to the influence of New York State's own Andrew Sloan Draper, the department's outgoing president.Footnote 20 Once in Brooklyn, the superintendents asked how the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Western hemisphere that coming October and the World's Fair and Columbian Exposition in Chicago could help promote their reform efforts. The American public took a keen interest in the Columbian Exposition––which would open in May 1893––due both to 1492's historical significance and Chicago's status as a rising city. Planners stoked this interest by advertising the event as a way of proving America's cultural and institutional superiority. Referencing its distinctive architecture, the press christened Chicago's fairgrounds the “White City” upon its opening, a title also befitting organizers’ imperial agenda of spreading American ideals around the world.Footnote 21 The head of the Exposition's Department of Liberal Arts, Selim H. Peabody, addressing those assembled at the NEA meeting, argued that to showcase their vital role in this process, the public schools deserved a starring role in this grandiose celebration. “For our exhibit we have the choicest place in the exposition,” Peabody boasted, adding, “We ought to make the educational exhibition the jeweled crown of the [Columbian Exposition].”Footnote 22

These educators also aimed to move the celebration beyond Chicago. Forming an executive committee charged with planning an event they would dub the “Columbian School Celebration,” they called for cities and towns across the nation to make schools the center of attention on Columbus Day. This coalition organized both in-school festivities and public parades. Such parades, featuring scores of marching children, evoked the grand displays of partisan politics that had only recently begun to fall out of favor among urban party leaders. Though educators adopted this political style just as partisans began switching to educational tactics, they likely understood the popular appeal a militant display of marchers held for countless Americans. While political parties’ newly information-based campaigns alienated much of the electorate in part by design, educators hoped to speak to the broadest audience possible by placing schools at the center of an uplifting public performance.Footnote 23

The superintendents’ nascent plans for the Columbian School Celebration came at the behest of Francis Bellamy, who traveled from Boston for the meeting. Bellamy, a former Baptist minister and avowed Christian socialist, joined the staff of popular periodical The Youth's Companion the previous year, and his quest for social justice and brimming patriotic fervor equally informed his efforts to organize the Columbian School Celebration.Footnote 24 Bellamy––like his famous cousin, Looking Backward scribe Edward Bellamy––was an ardent advocate of the social gospel and what the similarly righteous and influential public thinker Josiah Strong dubbed the “new nationalism.” Like Strong, a deep concern with the nation's growing immigrant population informed Bellamy's work. Patriotic thought in these years brimmed with concerns about the nation's shifting racial and ethnic character, trends that also galvanized popular support for an expanded school system in Brooklyn. Similarly, assumptions about the importance of race to the nation's past and future seeped into both quadricentennial celebrations and the lessons that students received in classrooms. Yet countering Strong's hysterical tone in books like Our Country, Bellamy and the era's school reformers proffered a ready solution to these dilemmas: a well-organized and patriotic public education system.Footnote 25

While the era's self-proclaimed patriots warned of the threat that racial others and political radicals posed to the nation, many also possessed a striking faith in the power of institutional reforms to eliminate these perceived threats. School reformers made such arguments with ease. They claimed developing the nation's public school system would give every American an equal education, ameliorating the class tensions exacerbated by industrial capitalism and creating a truly democratic public. The visions of America's future proffered by Bellamy and Brooklyn educators like Maxwell blended both these utopian notions of the school's democratizing power and romantic invocations of the nation's past. The Columbian parades, then, advertised schools’ potential to create an egalitarian, democratic nation while using nationalist symbols and rhetoric placed them squarely in line with traditionally understood American values.Footnote 26 Addressing schoolchildren across the nation, a message from Bellamy and the celebration's executive committee in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle cast the celebration as the opening salvo in a broader social movement: “[t]he interest of the public will be awakened if the scholars join in the earnest request that the school be allowed to be the center of the day's observance … You have the chance to conduct a patriotic movement that will strengthen the republic through the coming century.”Footnote 27 Bellamy declared schoolchildren natural purveyors of patriotic sentiment and claimed that with their enthusiastic support the celebration would strengthen both Brooklyn's public schools and the nation's collective spirit.

Bellamy also promoted the Columbian School Celebration at the NEA's annual meeting in Saratoga Springs, New York, that July. His message found a receptive audience of hundreds of educators from throughout the nation and President Benjamin Harrison. After all, as Harrison noted in the meeting's introductory speech, “the President of the United States should review the teachers of the land as … he should review its army or its militia.” Offering an endorsement of Bellamy's efforts steeped in military metaphors, Harrison argued the public schools could arm children with a patriotic spirit that would help sustain the nation for years to come.Footnote 28 Not long after Harrison's speech, Bellamy spoke on “Americanism in the Public Schools.” Arguing public education's chief purpose was inspiring nationalism, Bellamy claimed, “The flag over the school-yard makes the nation a real thing to the very ones who are most in want of that lesson. The daily ceremony of raising and saluting it is a perpetual education.” Bellamy cited the “thrilling salutes” he witnessed a group of immigrant children in New York City give as “evidence enough that the flag has as great a potency to Americanize the alien child as it has to lead regiments to death.” This suggested patriotic education could turn any student––regardless of their particular local culture, religious beliefs, or ethnic heritage––into an exemplary, even militant, citizen. To further illustrate this, Bellamy referenced a gift of twenty-five flags an eastern journal sent to Salt Lake City's schools, noting, “That stronghold of disloyalty echoed with patriotism for the first time in the history of Utah.”Footnote 29 This suggested both immigrants and the morally dubious Mormons in the nation's far west could be Americanized through patriotic education. Further, events like the Columbian School Celebration would establish the public school as the only institution, as Bellamy told the crowd at Saratoga Springs, with the power to “develop a new race of Americans.”Footnote 30

AN OBJECT LESSON IN LOYALTY: THE COLUMBIAN SCHOOL PARADES

After months of planning, reformers had coordinated an unprecedented national celebration, drumming up a considerable amount of public interest. Early that October, Brooklyn's board of education and fifty of the city's school principals finalized their plans for the city's Columbian gala. They called for a military and civic parade consisting of at least 6,000 public school students, ordering school closures for both Columbus Day, October 12, and the date of the national ceremony, October 21.Footnote 31 They also organized the regiments of schoolchildren marching in the parade, deciding to include only male students. While they gave no justification for this choice, organizers’ vision of an all-male contingent marching beside Civil War veterans, police officers, and male voluntary associations signaled to the crowd that these young boys would in short time be the nation's leaders in business, politics, and the military. Though prohibited from marching, students from Girls’ High School would provide the opening exercises on the morning of the celebration. Separating students by their sex, organizers decided singing and orating suited young girls more than marching, a choice that reflected the gendered ideal of citizenship that still dominated popular politics.Footnote 32

The city also supplied 50,000 copies of Bellamy and the Companion’s “Official Programme,” a document designed to ensure performances across the nation had some semblance of uniformity, to its public schools. Though few realized it at the time, the most vital of the program's litany of patriotic songs and speeches was the “Pledge of Allegiance,” a brief oath Bellamy composed specifically for the occasion. While even Bellamy doubted the “Pledge” would become a ubiquitous ritual in schools across the country, its ascent underscores just how central patriotic thinking was to the growth of modern public education in America.Footnote 33 Indeed, the inaugural performance of the “Pledge” at the Columbian School Celebration simultaneously promoted another of the Companion’s causes: the “flag over the schoolhouse” movement. For supporters like Bellamy and the Companion, hoisting the flag both advertised the school as a hub for American ideals and ensured the nation's children would internalize the principles it represented. This campaign brought together groups with relatively diverse political leanings, as those with radical social agendas like Bellamy and generally conservative patriotic organizations like the Grand Army of the Republic and the Daughters of the American Revolution all championed the cause. No higher authority than President Harrison also praised these efforts, declaring at the NEA's meeting in Saratoga Springs, “I rejoice in nothing more than in this movement, recently so prominently developed, of placing the starry banner above every schoolhouse.”Footnote 34 This project dovetailed nicely with educators’ efforts to cast schools as quintessentially American institutions. Not coincidentally, Brooklyn's board of education had approved a measure earlier in 1892 providing each school with ten dollars to erect a flagstaff and a United States flag.Footnote 35 Fittingly, the Companion’s program closed with a reading of Edna Dean Proctor's poem “Columbia's Starry Banner,” which neatly tied together the day's emphases on both Columbus and the flag with its encouraging request to “Uplift the starry Banner! The best age is begun!” standing alongside a depiction of Americans as “the heirs of the mariners whose voyage that morn was done.”Footnote 36

As the Columbian School Celebration approached, Helen Kibbe, the student editor of The School Reporter, a publication of Brooklyn's Grammar School No. 35, described the scene: “Our magnificent cities are decked with flags and bunting, bells are ringing, soldiers marching, preachers eulogizing the wonderful, and last but not least the public schools are doing their best to show their appreciation of the great event.” Kibbe recognized that public schools across the nation would play a major role in these celebrations. She also understood that celebrating Columbus had a nationalist purpose, noting that while he may have been either “generous and noble” or “possibly despotic and covetous,” his chief virtue was that “He has given us the position we now occupy in this free and glorious land.” She added, “The glorious flag which flies about us, with its beautiful stars and stripes, is honored by all nations. It is our symbol of patriotism and progress. Three cheers for the red, white and blue!”Footnote 37 Students in Brooklyn's schools, as Kibbe's writings suggest, approached the Columbian School Celebration with a clear sense of its patriotic mission. They now faced the task of stirring the same feeling among the city's taxpayers.

Just eleven days prior to Brooklyn's parade, many of its residents traveled across the Brooklyn Bridge to witness another grand display of patriotism. On October 10, New York City hosted a parade as part of a weeklong celebration of Columbus featuring over 10,000 public school children culled from Manhattan, Brooklyn, and other nearby locales, in addition to at least 5,000 from parochial schools. This “Great School Parade,” as the New York Times called it, featured not only a combination of public and parochial students, but also a contingent from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Founded in 1879 by Richard Henry Pratt, the Carlisle School plucked students from distant reservations while combining military-style discipline, industrial training, and a traditional academic curriculum. Much of the Columbian celebrations’ symbolism reflected a then-popular interpretation of history that distinguished Americans from their European forebears by virtue of their efforts to settle the frontier, most notably their battles against the continent's native population. Americans’ eventual victory owed as much to their perceived racial advantages as it did to their superior methods of social organization, so the story went. To parade organizers, then, the Carlisle School both signaled the triumph of American institutions over a once savage continent and served as an example of education's transformative potential. The crowd in Manhattan stood in awe of the Carlisle students. As the New York Tribune claimed, “The Indian boys marched with perfect step, and as they came opposite the President's stand every head of stiff black hair was bared in respectful salute, and with a military precision that no pale-faced organization equaled.” The Carlisle students’ presence suggested education could uplift all Americans, offering a powerful illustration of public school reformers’ claims that giving every child at least a primary education could revitalize the nation.Footnote 38

Following the parade, a massive fireworks display illuminated the sky over the Brooklyn Bridge, a spectacular end to a celebration that brought countless onlookers to the streets of Manhattan. The Times claimed that the parade had set a new standard: “All Past Parade Records Sent to the Rear,” with over 51,000 participants. Brooklyn denizens had turned out in droves for event in New York, with the Times alleging the abundance of travelers crossing the Brooklyn Bridge taxed its capacity. Catholic societies in Brooklyn alone sent over 3,000 to participate in the parade. Even after traversing back over the East River, however, Brooklynites could look forward to yet another grandiose celebration of the public schools.Footnote 39

Brooklyn's board of education planned a parade of unprecedented size and scope. While girls and boys from the public schools marched alongside those from parochial schools and even students from Carlisle in Manhattan, however, Brooklyn's parade was set to include only male students from the public schools. Rather than compromise the event's purposefully masculine and implicitly Protestant dynamic, Brooklyn instead accommodated a parade featuring Catholic schoolchildren the day before the Columbian School Celebration, where a reported 20,000 children hailing from 53 Catholic schools and orphan asylums marched on October 20, 1892. These children equally stressed their patriotic zeal and the faith––and for some, lineage––they shared with Columbus. As the New York Tribune reported, “Many of the children bore flags, and the captains of the companies had staffs decorated with red, white, and blue. There were numerous pictures of Columbus carried by the children, and the children of the Italian churches wore costumes of the time of Columbus.”Footnote 40 Though the vast majority of Brooklyn's Catholics claimed Irish heritage, many observers noted the patriotic fervor of the city's rising Italian population. As an editorial in The School Reporter claimed with perhaps a hint of derision, “The Italians are in great feather this month. Even the small peanut stands have been gaily decorated with flags. Would Columbus recognize his countrymen if he should suddenly appear among us?”Footnote 41 Whether Columbus would fail to comprehend Italian immigrants’ status as peanut salesmen or patriots was left open to interpretation. Italian or not, however, Brooklyn's Catholic schoolchildren offered full-throated expressions of patriotism while simultaneously emphasizing their religious connection with Columbus throughout 1892, receiving a great deal of positive press in the process. Brooklyn's Catholics ably employed historical pageantry in promoting their schools and their faith.Footnote 42 Indeed, the event's focus on Columbus allowed Catholics, despite protests from Bellamy and other believers in America's essentially Anglo-Saxon character, to argue their faith had been a part of American history since the beginning. Despite their staunch belief in public education, many of the era's school reformers saw promise in parochial schools’ embrace of patriotism. At the least, sending these children to parochial schools seemed preferable to the prospect of them roaming the streets. So while neither the media nor school officials publicly condemned the Catholic parade, tellingly, as the city's Catholic schools marched on October 20, many onlookers instead watched performances of The Youth's Companion’s official program at the public schools.Footnote 43

Brooklyn's festivities marking the Columbian anniversary culminated with the next day's public school parade. While its organizers had asked that at least 6,000 boys march alongside a slew of veterans’ organizations and fraternal societies, the final count was well over 10,000. Although Chicago was technically the school celebration's locus, Brooklyn's concurrent parade drew significant national attention. As the Chicago Tribune pointed out, “Brooklyn's celebration of Columbus day was second only to Chicago's,” and indeed was “the greatest ever seen in the City of Churches.”Footnote 44 Following the parade, Maxwell praised its symbolic importance for the city's schools while noting the considerable effort it took to make this event possible. Maxwell claimed the parade “was a task of such magnitude and difficulty, that those who performed it would hesitate before undertaking it a second time.” Despite these trials, which included transporting some boys to the start of the parade route and back home again, Maxwell lauded students’ orderliness and enthusiasm. Yet the preparations also meant that, “school work was demoralized for nearly two weeks.” While children may have missed out on formal lessons, however, Maxwell claimed that the parade achieved more important ends: “The marching of the boys elicited the plaudits of the spectators and the praises of the press, and excited the admiration of even veteran soldiers … the parade was more than worth it in the lessons of order and obedience it taught our boys and in that it showed the people of our city something of the forces, inherent in the public schools, that make for good citizenship.” Acknowledging the masculine nature of both the display and American citizenship more generally, Maxwell cheered the parade's success in showcasing the public schools’ potential. The celebration proclaimed to the city's taxpayers that public education could create an intelligent and patriotic citizenry, in Maxwell's estimation making the trials of organizing over 10,000 boys worthwhile.Footnote 45

The parade's grand marshal, Isaac S. Catlin, was impressed as well, claiming that seeing the “public schools marching with proud step and uplifted banners through the streets of Brooklyn will make a memorable epoch in her history.” He deemed the day a “forcible and lasting object lesson in practical patriotism and genuine love of the American flag.” Catlin's praise of the veritable army of students that marched in the parade was just the kind organizers hoped to hear. The city's public schools, according to top officials and the press, successfully demonstrated their patriotism. For school reformers this was indeed a salutary result, one they hoped would bode well for reform efforts both in Brooklyn and across the country.Footnote 46

INTEREST AND REVERENCE: NATION AND RACE IN A BROOKLYN SCHOOL

The Columbian parades were impressive, albeit fleeting, displays of public education's transformative power. Yet their lessons found a lasting home inside of the nation's schools. Student compositions from Grammar School No. 35's The School Reporter during the months surrounding Brooklyn's parade display how schools’ pedagogical efforts supplemented reformers’ public relations work. Beginning publication in early 1892, The School Reporter compiled reports of pupil and teacher accomplishments, the daily happenings at No. 35 and around the city, and student-submitted compositions. No. 35 was one of three Brooklyn schools with an enrollment over 2,000, located in the city's largely middle-class Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood near both Boys’ and Girls’ High School. The school considered itself one of Brooklyn's finest. Inaugural student editor Arthur Folwell hoped this would increase the Reporter’s influence, proclaiming, “What a large circulation the Reporter ought to have!” This proved prescient, with the paper noting that by 1893 several schools in Brooklyn as well as in Manhattan, Hartford, Detroit, and St. Louis received issues of the Reporter.Footnote 47

Suggesting No. 35's administrators and teachers worked to spur student interest in current events and American history alike, early editions of the Reporter brimmed with patriotic rhetoric. Folwell's editorial that May, for instance, predicted that students would spend much of the month in anticipation of Memorial Day, “when we remember with thankful hearts that our Nation is one people made so by those whose graves we decorate in grateful remembrance.”Footnote 48 The nation's military history, especially the Civil War, was a common theme in the Reporter, much as it was during the Columbian parades. Notably, students emphasized the war's importance but made no mention of slavery.Footnote 49 This silence in part reflected Brooklyn's racial dynamics. Unlike other major cities in the North, Brooklyn's schools remained segregated in the early 1890s. New York State law allowed this arrangement––with the caveat that black schools receive equal funding––until later in the decade when Governor Theodore Roosevelt spearheaded its repeal. Yet as many educators and scholars alike recognized during the Progressive Era, slavery's legacy rested uneasily alongside the narrative of American development offered in textbooks. As a result, the Civil War came to be seen as a bonding experience that set the stage for the nation's inevitable ascent.Footnote 50

The School Reporter also reflected the popular trends of saluting the flag and championing Americanization efforts. Students composed sanguine salutes to battle-torn flags, as when Helen Bryant opined, “The old flags that have been through the wars, that have been torn and shredded by countless bullets, and that are now hanging in the headquarters of the regiment, are objects of interest and reverence … Not only is our flag viewed with admiration by our own people, but foreigners know and respect it for the free country which it represents, and many look forward to the time when they, too, shall dwell in ‘the land of the free, and the home of the brave.’” Echoing the rhetoric school reformers bandied about, Bryant's piece combined reverence for the nation's military past with an affirmation of the American flag's educational value.Footnote 51 A later issue featured a similar student submission lauding the inspirational and assimilatory power of the Statue of Liberty. Just as America's symbols and icons loomed large in the minds of students at Grammar School No. 35, so too did perceived social problems like mass immigration.Footnote 52

The Reporter pieces that most clearly reflected modern understandings of race, nation, and the power of education concerned Native Americans. Many student writings bore the influence of a nationalist discourse stressing the importance of interactions between whites and Indians, a reminder of the so-called savage forces Americans subdued as part of their march to greatness. After all, crowds at the Columbian School Celebration heard sweeping statements like Bellamy's description of North America prior to European contact as “a virgin world” where “Human life … had been without significance.”Footnote 53 Similarly, student writings in the Reporter are laden with expressions of racial dominance over and a fascination with Indians. Student John Fraser reflected on the “Savages of North America,” describing present-day Indians as possessing a proclivity for hunting and an innate disdain for education.Footnote 54 Another student wrote an original story titled “The Indian's Favorite” about a white girl raised in an Indian tribe who discovers her racial heritage and triumphantly returns to her birthparents’ sprawling Southern plantation.Footnote 55 Despite this emphasis on Indians’ apparent difference, some students championed the popular notion that schooling in American ideals could transform them into upstanding citizens. One piece ruminated on an issue of great interest to those concerned with both the Indian question and progressive education: the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Much as observers at New York City's Columbus Day parade marveled at the contingent from Carlisle, this student cheered the school's work assimilating Indians, noting, “they arrive often in a sad condition, with dirty hair and torn blankets and their long coarse hair matted and unkept [sic]. In less than a month, however, these same Indians are dressed to such a degree as hardly to be recognized.” Echoing the evolutionary bent of the era's historical thought, the article declared the average Indian “two thousand years behind his contemporaries in civilization,” before praising Richard Henry Pratt, “whose work is to do for the Indian in a few years what it has taken the civilized races of to-day fifteen hundred years to accomplish.” As during the parades, Carlisle provided a salient example of the transformative potential of education.Footnote 56

Writings like these echoed the story of national development presented in the newest textbooks. Brooklyn's board of education approved several history textbooks in 1892, each emphasizing how settling the frontier shaped the American character.Footnote 57 One of these texts, D. H. Montgomery's The Leading Facts of American History, informed students that the Indian wars “trained [Americans] for union and independence.” This after informing students that Columbus engaged in “Providential work” in discovering America.Footnote 58 Another of these textbooks, Mary Sheldon-Barnes's Studies in American History, introduced the first in a number of entries on “Indian troubles” by noting, “This series on the whole will show that our Indian troubles have been constant, springing always from similar causes, carried on by similar methods, and resulting always in the dominion of whites.” Studying Indian wars and other national conflicts mattered to Sheldon-Barnes because, as she put it, “Wars thus become the watchwords of heroism, banners of memory, bonds of blood-kinship to a people. In the study of the heroic deeds of peace and war you lay a concrete basis for patriotism, without saying a word about it.” The pages of the Reporter suggest that at least some Brooklyn students took these lessons to heart.Footnote 59

While students at No. 35 learned to revere their country and its history, they also showed a great deal of pride in their school. Perhaps seeing a way to show off both their patriotism and the school's achievements, they expressed hope that their work might be displayed at the Columbian Exposition. An aside in the Reporter’s June 1892 issue noted that, “Some schools, not in Brooklyn, have prepared … material for the World's Fair. What school shall be allowed to do more than No. 35?”Footnote 60 Brooklyn's board of education also deemed this a priority, providing $1,000 to three separate committees tasked with selecting student works to send to Chicago. The board lauded this project's “stimulating effect” on students, arguing the schools’ participation would prove “the dignity and patriotism of our city[.]”Footnote 61 Presenting students’ best work, they claimed, could similarly cast the public schools in a patriotic light. By bringing the school to the public, Brooklyn's educational leaders offered a vision of how America's future could be built from the ground up. The institution best suited for remaking America, they suggested, was the same one that had been in the business of making Americans all along.Footnote 62

CONCLUSION: LEADING THE NATION INTO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

As part of the Columbian School Celebration, attendees in Brooklyn and countless cities and towns across the nation heard a reading of “The Meaning of the Four Centuries,” a message Bellamy prepared for the occasion. Though it failed to catch on the way his “Pledge of Allegiance” did, the piece nonetheless reveals a great deal about the relationship between school reform and patriotic thought in these years. Bellamy declared “the system of free and universal education … the master force which, under God, has been informing each of our generations with the particular truths of Americanism.” “America,” he added, “gathers her sons around the school house to-day as the institution closest to the people, most characteristic of the people, and fullest of hope for the people.”Footnote 63 This piece cast the public schools as both the solution to America's present problems and the reason for its past success. At a moment when concerns over the nation's changing demographics and social conditions reached a fever pitch, ceremonies like this informed the public that the institution that could redress these problems was the one that had made America great in the first place: the public school.

Progressive educators in Brooklyn and beyond set out to transform American society through school reform. In the process, they helped establish the school as a symbol of American nationalism. Their campaign to create a modern public school system was at the same time a patriotic crusade, and as Americans came to terms with this project they had to grapple with both the increased power and scope of the school and the patriotic culture that it sustained. By the early twentieth century, the language of patriotism came to appear as a vital component of a proper American education. While patriotism in schools became a contested point for most of the twentieth century, much of the public came to agree that national success and even the very survival of American democracy depended on a strong public school system.Footnote 64 This common belief in education's utopian potential, however, hardly seemed guaranteed in the late nineteenth century. The rising significance of this notion and the attendant growth of massive urban school districts during the Progressive Era stemmed not merely from the forces of industrialization and immigration, but from a carefully orchestrated patriotic campaign heralding the promise of popular education.

References

NOTES

1 “Brooklyn's Great Parade,” New York Times, Oct. 22, 1892, 1. Quotes from “The Memorial Arch Dedicated,” New York Times, Oct. 22, 1892, 1.

2 This study uses “progressive education” in describing the wide-ranging efforts––involving both pedagogy and the structure and management of schools––to transform American education during the Progressive Era. It deems certain educators, schools, and policies “progressive” when their own words and actions reflect these trends or if observers at the time referred to them as such. Historians of education have defined educational progressivism in several ways, the most common being David Tyack's distinction in The One Best System between business-minded administrative progressives and child-centered pedagogical progressives. While acknowledging this diversity, I stress these groups’ similar use of patriotic discourse and shared support for an expansive public education system.

3 On patriotism in schools and the nature of progressive patriotic thought, see Ellis, Richard J., To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005), 1–80 Google Scholar; Hansen, Jonathan M., The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), xiii–xxii CrossRefGoogle Scholar; O'Leary, Cecelia Elizabeth, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 150–93Google Scholar.

4 On progressive education as the educational wing of progressivism, see Cremin, Lawrence A., The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961)Google Scholar. On school reform as social control, see Katz, Michael B., The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968)Google Scholar. For a “new middle class” bent on professionalizing education, see Tyack, David B., The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974)Google Scholar. For business thinking, see Callahan, Raymond E., Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962)Google Scholar. On progressive reforms’ diverse origins, see Reese, William J., Power and the Promise of School Reform: Grassroots Movements During the Progressive Era (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986)Google Scholar; Mirel, Jeffery, The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System: Detriot, 1907–81 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 1–42 Google Scholar; Reese, “The Origins of Progressive Education,” History of Education Quarterly 41:1 (Spring 2001): 1–24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On schools and the modern state, see Steffes, Tracy, School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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14 On millennial thinking in education and “child-centered” learning, see Reese, “The Origins of Progressive Education,” 17–23.

15 “The Talk of Brooklyn,” New York Times, July 20, 1890, 16; “Some Handsome Schoolhouses,” New York Times, Apr. 20, 1891, 8; “Discussed in Brooklyn, New York Times, Sept. 4, 1892, 16; Boy's High School (Brooklyn, NY), “The Red and the Black” (1897), 11. Boy's High School Collection, Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn, NY.

16 “New High School Opened,” New York Times, Sept. 28, 1892, 3.

17 City of Brooklyn Board of Education, Annual Report of the President (1893), 33–34. Series 6, Board of Education Records, Municipal Archives, New York, NY. City of Brooklyn Board of Education, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction to the Board of Education of the City of Brooklyn (1892), 51–53. Series 5, Board of Education Records, Municipal Archives, New York, NY. Quote on 53.

18 “New High School Opened,” New York Times, Sept. 28, 1892, 3.

19 “Needs of Public Schools,” New York Times, Feb. 17, 1892, 8.

20 National Education Association, Addresses and Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.: National Educational Association, 1891), 387–88Google ScholarPubMed.

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22 “Mind Trainers,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Feb. 17, 1892, 1.

23 McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics, 9, 99–103.

24 On Bellamy, see Ellis, To the Flag, 1–49; and O'Leary, To Die For, 157–60.

25 Ellis, To the Flag, 31–35. Strong warned of the threats posed by immigrants and political radicals, conflating the two categories. See Strong, Josiah, Our County: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1885)Google Scholar.

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27 “Columbus Day,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 24, 1892, 1.

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36 Proctor's poem featured prominently at ceremonies across the nation, with Idaho Statesman declaring it “a masterpiece.” “Columbia's Banner Ode for Columbus Day,” Idaho Statesman (Boise, ID), Sept. 27, 1892, 6; “A Patriotic Programme: Plans for the Public School Observation of Columbus Day,” Idaho Statesman (Boise, ID).

37 Kibbe, Helen C., “Editorial,” The School Reporter 1:6 (Oct. 1892), 62–63 Google Scholar. Folder 5, Box 6, Brooklyn Schools Collection, Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn, NY.

38 “The Great School Parade,” New York Times, Oct. 5, 1892, 9; “Children Honor Columbus,” New York Tribune, Oct. 11, 1892, 1. On public perceptions of Carlisle, see Berkhofer, Robert F. Jr., The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 171 Google Scholar. On Indian education and progressive education, see Adams, David Wallace, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: The University of Kansas Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

39 “The Climax of the Week,” New York Times, Oct. 13, 1892, 9; “Imposing Military Parade,” Washington Post, Oct. 13, 1892, 1; “Among the Catholic Parishes,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Oct. 16, 1892, 18.

40 “The Celebration Begins,” New York Tribune, Oct. 21, 1892, 3.

41 Kibbe, Helen C., “Editorial,” The School Reporter 1:6 (Oct. 1892), 62–63 Google Scholar. Folder 5, Box 6, Brooklyn Schools Collection, Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn, NY.

42 In Brooklyn and New York, Protestant/Catholic tensions dominated political life for much of the nineteenth century. Yet regarding school politics, compromise characterized the relationship in the late nineteenth century, as shown in Justice, Benjamin, The War that Wasn't: Religious Conflict and Compromise in the Common Schools of New York State, 1865–1900 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005)Google Scholar. Still, conflicts between the two groups over schooling dated to the 1840s, and Protestant suspicions of Catholic radicalism only strengthened as the city's Italian population rose. See Wallace, Mike and Burrows, Edwin G., Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1089–1131 Google Scholar; Golway, Terry, Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (New York: Liveright Publishing Co., 2014), 22–30 Google Scholar.

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