Since the Progressive Era itself, scholars have exhibited strong interest in the connections between progressivism and education. Historical studies have elucidated countless ways that such reformist impulses as the settlement house movement, the country life movement, the progressive education movement, the “cult of efficiency,” and battles against social ills like child labor influenced early twentieth-century education policy.Footnote 1 Indeed, as historian Lawrence Cremin has contended, “the Progressive mind was ultimately an educator's mind, and … its characteristic contribution was that of a socially responsible reformist pedagogue.”Footnote 2
Throughout the Progressive Era, movements to expand and rationalize public education swept the United States. Nationwide, educators, reformers, and politicians at the state and municipal levels demanded faculty professionalization, curricular modernization, and district consolidation. At this time, New York State experienced paroxysms of school reform similar to those flaring in much of the country.Footnote 3 Yet despite its many similarities to those other movements, the history of progressive education initiatives in New York reveals an especially egalitarian and democratic approach to reform.
Although the rhetoric of Progressive Era school reformers nationwide abounded with calls for “equal opportunity,” reformers in New York envisioned universal educational access as a fundamental facet of the state's wider welfare apparatus. This reflected the unique brand of progressivism practiced by Alfred E. Smith, the New York City Democrat who served as governor during the crucial period of reform in the 1920s.Footnote 4 In New York, Smith and a motley coalition of social work activists and ethnic machine politicians developed a particular progressivism that sought social uplift through the creation of a robust welfare regime, constructed on a foundation of broad popular support and maintained through direct democratic appeals. Early in Smith's tenure, school reform emerged as a centerpiece of the governor's democratic approach to progressive statecraft.
The political ramifications of these policy priorities were profound: in a decade of increasing professionalization, when “pedagogical progressivism found itself increasingly cut off from its sources in the broader Progressive movement” and fewer progressive laypeople “concerned themselves directly with educational reform,” Governor Smith plunged headlong into a series of battles to fund, reform, and reorganize New York's public schools.Footnote 5 In a manner characteristic of progressive executive leadership, Smith relied heavily on the scientific conclusions of scholars and experts, and thus his administration furnished a particularly favorable forum for professional educators to promote their agenda. Moreover, having accepted the findings and prescriptions of these experts, Smith adopted their school reforms wholesale—not merely as a plank in a party platform, but as a central facet of a broad progressive agenda for New York State. To an extent matched by few other governors, Smith allowed his administration to serve as the conduit for the implementation of a progressive education program.Footnote 6 Of equal significance, that program became a cornerstone of his larger project of cultivating a progressive social welfare regime in New York. A sweeping vision informed Smith's governorship that included prodigious state investment in health care, welfare, and recreation, and an array of protective labor laws. Public education was arguably the foundational component of this far-reaching progressive platform.
Historian Tracy L. Steffes, in a recent comprehensive study of Progressive Era education policies, compellingly makes the case for centering analysis of school and society on the state: “School reform and expansion reflected a major project of state-building and governance that extended public authority into households and pursued social policy goals through education.” Steffes argues further that this project “reinforced individualism at the heart of American political culture and emphasized individual over collective responsibility,” simultaneously obscuring “the extent to which opportunity was stratified and unequal and schools could serve to deepen these inequities.”Footnote 7
The present study joins Steffes in pressing the literature to acknowledge the centrality of the state but does not similarly view education as effectively a substitute for robust social welfare programs. In the case of 1920s New York, public education was but one especially important iteration of a broader social welfare impulse that included both the “traditional” or “middle-class” focus on opportunity and a profound interest in remedying socioeconomic inequalities through protective legislation, a social safety net, and mildly redistributive programs.Footnote 8 Indeed, seeking radically to transform education in the Empire State, Smith and his associates embarked on a perceptibly distinctive program: reforms were pursued at the state, rather than the local level; the ultimate vehicle for reworking the state's education system was fiscal, rather than curricular; and the political character of the campaign for reform was popular, rather than elitist.
Indeed, while much of Smith's program superficially resembles other progressive education crusades, the social and political milieu imbued the program with a more popular temper. Smith advocated increased school funding, higher teacher pay, modernized buildings, equalized distribution of educational resources, and a more robust role for the state in supporting these endeavors. But then, so did the Ku Klux Klan.Footnote 9 Led by reactionaries, schools could serve as agents of racial segregation or a chauvinistic Americanism; pursued by miserly administrators, state-level initiatives demanding local school modernization could yield only unfunded mandates.Footnote 10 Context matters—and reveals Smith's educational reformism as a distinctive outgrowth of his broader social welfare progressivism.
Smith's progressivism was therefore not the angst-ridden coercion described in Richard Hofstadter's classic Age of Reform or the more recent work of historian Michael McGerr—who has labeled progressivism “the creed of a crusading middle class” intent on transforming everyone else in its own image.Footnote 11 Smith's vision, and his actual reforms, tell a dramatically different story. A working-class son of Manhattan's Lower East Side, Al Smith was not well educated, having been forced to withdraw from school after the eighth grade to support his family following the death of his father. He often noted this when arguing for expanded—indeed universal—educational opportunity in New York, explaining that as a result of this deprivation, “no one would have a better appreciation of the value of education than I have.” This, he claimed, was the reason that he had “struggled all during my public career to put the State in the strongest position in which it could possibly be placed to extend the full benefits of education to all the children of the State.”Footnote 12 Decades after Smith's death, his long-time advisor Robert Moses recalled that while the governor had often joked “that his only academic degree was an F. F. M.” (standing for the Fulton Fish Market, where he had worked as an adolescent), “in spite, and perhaps because of his very limited advantages in early youth, Governor Smith never decried formal education,” harboring instead “an almost exaggerated respect” for the benefits of schooling.Footnote 13
Other contextualizing elements were also of deep significance to the progressive political events that transpired in the Empire State during the 1920s. One was the setting, for New York had a long history of pioneering state involvement in education—creating the Regents of the University of the State of New York in 1784 and empowering that body to promote common schools throughout the nineteenth century; establishing elementary schooling through state legislation in 1812; abolishing ward-based school administration in New York City in 1896 (and reinforcing that centralization in 1917); and opening the battle statewide for district consolidation by 1911.Footnote 14 The political traditions of the Empire State also furnish some background for the reforms of the 1920s: rivalries between New York City interests and upstate groups had yielded constitutional mechanisms granting the state legislature sweeping powers over local finances and also produced a shamelessly gerrymandered legislature that minimized urban representation—so that despite Smith's four statewide electoral triumphs, his party never controlled both houses of the state legislature.Footnote 15 Moreover, overarching national trends in education reform ranging from rural schooling to administrative efficiency lent programmatic substance to Smith's policy endeavors.Footnote 16
Smith was similar to many reformers in viewing quality education as central to the democratic project and key to the political, economic, and social success both of the individual and the community.Footnote 17 Consistent with his broader progressive program, Smith strongly believed that the state had a fundamental responsibility to provide all of its citizens with the security and tools necessary to lead successful and dignified lives in a modern society—through decent housing, accessible medical care, recreational opportunities, humane labor protections, and quality schools. Like John Dewey and many other progressive thinkers more traditionally associated with education reform, Smith saw the school as “the center of the struggle for a better life.”Footnote 18 Public education was thus a fundamental building block of his robust progressive welfare state.
I
When Al Smith assumed the governorship in 1919, public education in New York was in utter disrepair. Increasing numbers of teaching vacancies left classrooms unstaffed in the cities, while an archaic adherence to a community-based system of one-room schoolhouses left the countryside with inadequate facilities and outdated curricula. Smith's inaugural address made clear that public schools would be a top priority: “The industrial efficiency, the economic soundness, and the civic righteousness of the State very largely depend upon our educational system,” warned the governor, “it should be the objective of the State that no person who can be brought under our influence, should be without ability to read and write, or without a clear conception of our American institutions and ideals.” To achieve such lofty goals, Smith was willing to spend prodigally. “I strongly recommend that whatever curtailment may be necessary elsewhere, full and adequate provision be made for the education and training of our children.”Footnote 19
Smith thus sounded the opening bell of the long fight at Albany for state-level school reform. Such activities had been underway for decades at the municipal level—with mixed results. But over his four terms as governor, Smith would doggedly pursue the agenda articulated in his inaugural address by transferring initiative to the state. His administration would first focus upon subjects especially familiar to the governor and his allies: battles over urban schools would provide elementary lessons in the mechanics of reform and the politics of education that would be invaluable in later struggles over country schools. Indeed, the administration's overarching desire to provide equality of opportunity to students of all backgrounds within the context of a broadly defined social welfare regime provided thematic and material connections between Smith's struggles for urban and rural school reforms.
The first front in Smith's battle to modernize education in the Empire State was therefore New York City. Smith understood the problems of urban schools as one facet of the broader social problems of the modern metropolis—in his 1929 memoir, for example, he flowed seamlessly from discussion of tenement conditions and New York City's housing crisis into a long passage on the challenges facing urban schools. Moreover, he understood these problems firsthand:
I lived in a neighborhood and was brought up in an environment where, because of conditions outside the control of parents, I saw many deprived of [educational] opportunity. While they may have been successful in after-life, I always realized their handicap when they entered the struggle that comes in after years. I might add that I brought my own personal experience to my study of the subject. … lost time cannot be regained by children who are injured by the state's failure to make adequate provision for their education.Footnote 20
Indeed, as Smith assumed office, conditions were little better than those of the Gilded Age Lower East Side of his youth. Across the metropolis, hundreds of classes went without teachers. A 1919 New York Times exposé revealed on the day of its citywide investigation 1,178 classes forced either to “double-up” with other classes or to be taught by substitutes. Worse, “32,097 students were deprived of the benefit even of these expedients and had no instruction. On another day the number rose to 50,000.” The Times blamed this appallingly inadequate staffing on poor salaries: “The situation … in New York … is acute. The number of new applicants for teachers’ positions falls far short of the demand. Those who do apply are of inferior quality, and the best of those who are already in the system are leaving it for better paying jobs in the business world.”Footnote 21
Although conditions in New York City were critical by the time Smith assumed office in 1919, not all parties favored increased salaries for teachers. Real estate interests strongly opposed any tax increase to provide for higher pay.Footnote 22 Indeed, Mayor John F. Hylan cited such concerns in blocking a state bill to amend the City Charter to raise teachers’ salaries in New York City.Footnote 23
Opening day in the New York City public schools, between 1910 and 1915.
The problem had vexed New York educators for decades: in order to improve school conditions—indeed, in order even to provide schooling in many instances—more generous appropriations were required. Yet such funds must come primarily from the local jurisdictions that were responsible for public education under a scheme dating from the antebellum period. These jurisdictions, whether large urban municipalities or minuscule rural districts, usually lacked the resources to make necessary investments. Meanwhile, municipal politicians evinced little enthusiasm for new taxes. In the minds of progressives like Governor Smith, this dilemma opened the door for state intervention.
The alternative to a bill that would ostensibly have overburdened New York City's tax base was a proposal to increase teachers’ salaries statewide with a significant contribution from Albany. This second plan called for a state appropriation of $3.5 million for this purpose; nevertheless, it would still require a contribution from the city treasury of $15 million over three years. Because this bill dealt with the entire state, Hylan had no say in the matter, and the measure was signed into law by Governor Smith on May 19, 1919.Footnote 24 The state contribution did nothing to mollify antitax groups, and Smith's approval of the bill provoked “open warfare” between mayor and governor.Footnote 25 To Smith, however, investment in education, even if it meant increasing the tax burden, was socially necessary money well spent: “If we can stand $150,000,000 for a canal and $100,000,000 for good roads, we certainly ought to be able to spend money for education, without which neither canal nor roads would be worth a quarter.”Footnote 26
Given the choice between immediate fiscal prudence and long-term social benefit, Smith chose to spend. In the process, he swelled the role of the state in local education, a move that would presage his administration's approach to rural schools. Meanwhile, in a little less than six months in office, Smith had helped promote bills to increase salaries, provide equal pay for female teachers, and fight adult illiteracy statewide.Footnote 27 During the school year in which Smith took office, state contributions in aid of localities for public schools stood at $7.4 million; at the end of his first term, that figure was $33.9 million.Footnote 28 Additionally, the governor championed fiscal reforms at Albany that facilitated more robust spending on school construction in New York City: by relaxing “pay as you go” restrictions on such appropriations, Smith's reforms allowed the city to embark upon a $160 million building program in the 1920s—providing 145 new facilities for 211,296 students from 1923 to 1927.Footnote 29
As Smith began his second term in 1923, the New York Times reflected with satisfaction on the governor's pay initiative, editorializing that it had “made possible the increase of teachers’ salaries throughout the State at a time when the higher cost of living made the old salaries shamefully low.” Higher salaries would attract more applicants, predicted the Times. Upon signing the 1919 pay bill, Smith had made a similar forecast: “the vacancies in teaching staffs will be filled because of the raised salaries.” Indeed, by 1928, New York City had a surplus of teachers.Footnote 30
Nor had this been the last word on teacher pay—in 1920, with Smith's “urgent support,” the legislature mandated a minimum salary for teachers within the state's several jurisdictions and buttressed this decree with an appropriation of over $20 million.Footnote 31 Four years later these improvements were universalized when the legislature passed a bill that Smith had helped compose mandating pay equality for female teachers.Footnote 32 All of this had, in the governor's understanding, “required two things—money and nerve.”Footnote 33 Smith pressed for adequate financing and provided the political leadership requisite for successful reforms in a democratic system.
The political rhetoric and policy methods refined during these early urban battles would prove invaluable to the governor in future struggles—especially those fought upon far different terrain. The reforms of the city schools were in fact a prelude to a much larger initiative to overhaul rural education. As in the urban case, Smith was adopting prescriptions that had been formulated by professional educators elsewhere—his proposals for country schools were hardly unique—and in both cases, finances proved critical. However, as with the city, in the country Smith pursued these reforms in the context of a broader aggrandizement of the state's role in promoting social welfare, and he did so through popular democratic appeals.
II
Just as with the New York City reforms, state funding would be the linchpin of the most dramatic education scheme of the Smith years—rural school consolidation and modernization. Prior to his 1920 reelection defeat, Smith had overseen the appointment of a “Joint Committee on Rural Schools” to investigate the problems of country education.Footnote 34 In late 1922 the committee published its findings, and they became widely available in early 1923, just as Smith was restored to the governorship. The ensuing debate over rural schooling unveiled what Smith and other progressives considered the most egregious failures of public education in New York. For under professional scrutiny, the venerable “little red schoolhouse” began to appear dangerously anachronistic.
Within Smith's social welfare vision, justice demanded state action to provide rural students equal access to modern opportunities: “Certainly the children in the country sections of the state are entitled to the same advantages of education as are given to the children of the cities.”Footnote 35 Yet over the course of eleven decades, New York's pioneering antebellum initiatives for public schooling had ossified into inviolable traditions of local control, so that any state-level reform would be checked by precedent. In 1812, the state legislature created the district system of public education. Under this arrangement, each locality was the administrative unit for its own schools, and each of these units was responsible for funding its schools through local taxation.Footnote 36 The system would scatter thousands of small schools across the New York countryside, many of them one-room schoolhouses, many too meager to provide anything beyond rudimentary instruction and too poor to fund basic structural improvements. A potential remedy was district consolidation, which would create a larger tax base for each administrative unit (allowing for numerous structural and academic investments) and provide a larger population for each school (allowing for graded instruction). As early as 1877, the state legislature began considering measures in this vein; in 1911, 1,200 districts were consolidated within the boundaries of several cities, and in 1917 the legislature abolished the district system altogether, in favor of larger township units.Footnote 37 However, the outrage from rural New York was so “immediate and intense” that scores of politicians who had once favored consolidation—including Republican governor Charles Whitman—turned against the scheme, and it was repealed the following year.Footnote 38
Thus did the district system remain securely ensconced within the political and social framework of the Empire State, so that by the time Smith began his second term as governor in 1923, there remained “more than eight thousand single room schools.” Of these, 3,600 had an average daily attendance of 10 or less, 400 had five or less, and 15 schools operated for the benefit of a single pupil. Reformers grumbled vainly that this arrangement afforded “no possibility of giving these marooned pupils such educational advantages as city or village children have, without inordinate expense.”Footnote 39
Aside from the fiscal extravagance involved in running a local school for a single child, the rural schools committee found numerous deficiencies in the district system. The committee's report judged “the most serious handicap that the rural child encounters in his education” to be “the teaching personnel of the rural schools.” Rural teachers were found “more immature, far more inexperienced, less well educated, less well prepared professionally for their work, and very much less well supervised than … city teachers as a group.” The median age of a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse was 23.7, the median service time was four years, and 22 percent of these teachers were in their first year on the job. “Mature teachers,” concluded the report, likely eschewed careers in one- and two-room schoolhouses because of the “professional isolation” involved in such assignments.Footnote 40
These country teachers were not only inexperienced, they were also largely untrained. New York had, more than three decades earlier, spurred a national trend toward four-year baccalaureate training for prospective teachers by reorganizing the normal school at Albany into the State Normal College. Still, a “negligible” number of the state's rural schoolteachers had attended college, and “less than one-third of 1 percent of the rural school personnel” had earned degrees. A less negligible number—10 percent of all rural school teachers—had received no schooling beyond the elementary level.Footnote 41
Rural high schools were a point of particular embarrassment for the state, where “the percentage of pupils reaching the third and fourth years [was] considerably lower than that for the rural high schools of the United States as a whole.” In all but the largest of these schools, the principal was “regarded primarily as a class-room instructor,” with an “indefinite and vague” mission that often went unacknowledged by colleagues. This lack of an executive resulted in administrative anarchy—obstructing adjustments in the teaching load, leaving “insufficient attention … to the organization of the school,” and hampering professional mobilization.Footnote 42
Moreover, rural high schools lacked modern facilities. Since the beginning of the century, educators had been promoting the virtues of the “multi-faceted school plant,” and by the 1920s, modern school buildings ”usually contained libraries, music rooms, gymnasiums, and auditoriums.”Footnote 43 Yet some 80 percent of New York's rural high schools had no gymnasium; 75 percent lacked an auditorium. Laboratories and libraries were found “inadequate for the work of the high school of to-day.” Additionally, there was a general lack of appreciation for the educational value of extracurricular activities such as music, sports, and drama.Footnote 44
Particularly problematic were the one- and two-teacher schools. The committee found that “the typical school does not have enough window area to give sufficient light.” Heating systems were ineffective and inefficient. Among one- and two-teacher schools, 74 percent had no water and were dependent on a neighbor's well. Only 10 percent of the schools had adequate first aid supplies. A third lacked a satisfactory blackboard. Almost two-thirds of the one-teacher schools had outdoor bathroom facilities—and of these, only 25 percent were well-ventilated, only 30 percent were well-lit, and a full 42 percent did not offer students “sufficient seclusion.”Footnote 45
It was not merely spartan and unsanitary conditions that offended the sensibilities of modern observers. Obsolete facilities coalesced with a feeble faculty and administrative chaos to condemn rural students to academic disadvantage. In the elementary years, students at one- and two-teacher schools read a full grade level behind the average, with students at larger rural elementary schools faring only about a half-grade better. Among high school students, 27 percent struggled to read standard English prose. In all subjects, students at one- and two-teacher elementary and high schools scored significantly lower than students attending larger schools.Footnote 46
In response, the Rural School Survey made sweeping recommendations. Districts should seriously consider consolidation. Educators should undertake local studies of school buildings and grounds to demonstrate for their communities with specificity the urgency of present conditions. State officials should clarify building standards and make four-year high school universally available. They should also revise curricula and provide support for extracurricular activities. Moreover, the state must heighten dramatically qualifications for acceptance into the teaching corps and provide training to produce better-qualified educators.Footnote 47
Independent of state intervention however, calls for reform by indignant professional educators would come to naught, with the great difficulty once again revolving around finances. Indeed, the Rural School Survey had reached a pragmatic conclusion: “Many communities have so little wealth that, unaided, it is practically impossible for them to make all the changes … desired. Where this is true the state should give financial assistance. This is only a matter of fairness.”Footnote 48
Demands for equalization of opportunity through state financing fit neatly into Al Smith's larger progressive vision for New York, and so the governor swiftly integrated the prescriptions of the Survey into his reformist platform.Footnote 49 During the 1923 legislative session, a bill to institute many of the reforms called for by the Report passed the Democratic-controlled state senate at Governor Smith's urging, but failed in the assembly, where the Republican majority, mindful of the lessons of 1917, heeded rural citizens’ denunciations of the increased tax burden and the professional “paternalism” associated with consolidation.Footnote 50
Signaling once again the fundamental importance of education to his progressive agenda, Governor Smith unstintingly lent his considerable persuasive abilities to rural school reform and refashioned the movement into a popular cause. He caustically insisted that “the people who don't care to have schools any better today than the ones they themselves attended certainly cannot be credited with a great deal of interest in their children.”Footnote 51 In his annual message to the legislature in January 1924, Smith chided those who had worked to obstruct reform “upon the ground that the rural schools are well enough as they are and that they should be let alone,” stating unambiguously that “this type of opposition is not entitled to consideration.”Footnote 52 Confronted with concerns over the expense of the program, Smith was cavalier in his insistence on fully funding education: “Whatever other public function may have to bow to political expediency, education should never be compelled to do so. It must be maintained 100 per cent. efficient.”Footnote 53
The governor's efforts to galvanize public support through frequent appeals to popular politics became a peculiarly significant feature of his campaigns. When the Republican majority in the state assembly again derailed Smith's program in 1924, the governor made his proposals for rural schools a signature issue of his autumn reelection bid.Footnote 54 As he formally opened his campaign at Schenectady on October 4, the governor cited both his record of “increasing the state's contribution to education … by more than $36,000,000,” and the need for further reform.Footnote 55 At a Democratic women's luncheon in New York later that month, Smith decried the inequality of the status quo, declaring that “the state of New York is not giving to the children in the country parts of the State the same opportunity for an education that we are giving to the children in the cities,” and eliciting applause by demanding that “if we are going to keep our people in the country sections,” the state must endeavor to make rural life “attractive to them from the standpoint of giving them an opportunity to give their children an education.”Footnote 56
Reelected that November, Smith could now claim an implicit popular endorsement of his agenda. By placing rural education at the center of his campaign, the incumbent had in part tied his political fortunes to this program. Returning to Albany that winter, Smith again pursued rural school reform, calling for larger administrative and tax units and for more generous state aid to local schools.Footnote 57 On his third attempt, the governor was able to achieve these goals with the Central Rural Schools Act of 1925.Footnote 58 Districts electing to consolidate would be granted generous state aid, including 50 percent of the transportation cost and 25 percent of the cost of construction of the new central school.Footnote 59 Significantly, the bill was designed to be “entirely permissive in character,” allowing localities to choose whether to consolidate and opt in to the state program—easing the fears of some country legislators and simultaneously “challeng[ing] the local initiative of the community,” as the Rural School Survey had recommended.Footnote 60
This last point is important, because the voluntary feature of the consolidation bill made local opinion relevant to the success of any centralization proposal. Many rural voters looked askance at the new scheme, often fearing burdensome property taxes.Footnote 61 However, with the success of some central districts, many farmers saw their tax bills decrease (partially because the new system was more efficient, and partially due to significant state aid). Furthermore, the improvement in educational facilities and opportunities was so drastic that, for many farmers, the upgrades were certainly worth the potential price.
This process of waning skepticism and waxing enthusiasm is revealed in a letter written to Bureau of Rural Education chief Ray P. Snyder by L. H. McCluen, a self-described “dirt farmer” from Trumansburg:
My school taxes before centralization were $7.50 per thousand valuation. I believed that in case of centralization my taxes would be more than doubled, that they would be so high that I could not afford to pay them. In fact when I was told that a $225,000 school building could be erected and equipped and run without a material increase in my taxes … I thought those who said it were fit subjects for Willard Asylum. Our central school has now been running five years. … Our tax rate has averaged a little over eight dollars per thousand. It is five dollars on the assessed valuation this year and I doubt that it will ever be over five dollars per thousand on the real value.
Indeed, McCluen's initial concern about the potential tax burden threatened by the new school plan was supplanted by elation over the many benefits derived from the change by local youths:
After five years of experience, during which time I have made a careful study of the question, I am fully convinced that the central rural school is a great improvement over the old type of school for our country boys and girls. Through transportation the school is brought to our very doors. Our children are getting the same privileges and opportunities in music, drawing, physical training, vocational training and social training as the village boys and girls and at no increase in cost and they are home at night.
McCluen concluded that “any farmer who opposes central rural schools is opposing his best interests.”Footnote 62
By 1928, Smith could boast of the creation of two score new central districts.Footnote 63 In December of that year, after a tumultuous decade of progressive incursions into the public schools, New York hosted 130 rural educators for its inaugural Conference of Central District Boards of Education. Early in the proceedings at Syracuse's Onondaga Hotel, Assistant Commissioner for Elementary Education J. Cayce Morrison asked the congregation, “What do you have in the way of educational facilities that you did not have in that same district before the central district was formed?” This transformed the gathering into something of a pep rally, with each locality proudly cataloging recent achievements. Adams Center now provided four years of high school instead of three; Forestport had doubled to four from two; West Leyden and Hague both offered four instead of none. Richburg's six-person faculty had grown to fifteen, while Pine Island's solo schoolteacher had received a septet of reinforcements. Chappaqua had erected a $360,000 school building—featuring stonework, an auditorium, and a gymnasium. Along with Brockport, Chappaqua had also hired a school nurse, while the former had developed a “homemaking department.” Hamilton, Buchanan, and Adams Center all provided their students with transportation for the first time. Shrub Oak had constructed an auditorium and a gymnasium, as well as a “fine cafeteria.” Schroon Lake now boasted a high school orchestra, and Trumansburg had organized a soccer team and a track team. Georgetown anticipated the completion of its new gymnasium—a particularly exciting prospect for a town where “no boy has ever before had room enough to play a good game of basketball.” North Rose had established “a little school paper which is something new and of which we are very proud.”Footnote 64 At a similar conference two years later, one delegate inquired, “Are there any representatives here who are sorry they centralized?” After a few seconds of silence, the room broke into applause, and a second delegate concluded, “Then we all seem to be of one mind.”Footnote 65
Sanguine reactions were certainly predictable from educators involved in reform; and, in fact, there remained great resentment against the program in rural New York. Local groups continued to fight consolidation, often with success: a decade after Smith had left office, 250 central districts had been established, while 7,756 small rural districts maintained the status quo.Footnote 66 Moreover, although antitax sentiment remained strong, there was an equally significant cultural rift between many rural citizens and the professional educators who sought to modify the structure of the farm community.
Indeed, the extensive literature on local opposition to rural school consolidation and reform has typically revealed a sinister story: condescending professionals swarming the countryside spouting myopic notions of modernity and blatant expressions of urban superiority. On this reading, autocratic alien experts disregarded the democratic process and steamrolled local opposition.Footnote 67 Historian David B. Tyack noted that beyond dilapidated buildings, defective curricula, and overwhelmed faculty, “what was basically wrong with rural education,” in the minds of the reformers, “was that rural folk wanted to run their schools and didn't know what was good for them in the complex new society.”Footnote 68
In many cases, reformist attacks on the rural school threatened the farm community with a social crisis, for as historian Hal S. Barron has noted, “increasingly, for country people, their schools provided a sanctuary for the individualism and small scale of local life that were being threatened by the new, organizational society.”Footnote 69 Therefore, as historian Wayne E. Fuller suggests, to take away the small country school “was to wipe out the one building the people of the district had in common and, in fact, to destroy the community, which, in those years, so many were trying to save and strengthen.”Footnote 70
Meanwhile, reformers in New York and elsewhere occasionally exhibited what historian James H. Madison has summarized as the “arrogance and naiveté of outside experts judging and confronting a traditional community, particularly in their unwillingness or inability to consider seriously the way in which that community saw itself and its local institutions.”Footnote 71 These outsiders offered “unsolicited” advice and dismissed the trepidations of the community as “absurd,” “irrational,” “ignorant,” “selfish,” or “conservative.” Then, uncritically accepting the wisdom of their own prescriptions, the reformers undertook “anti-democratic” and divisive campaigns to impose their will on reluctant yeomen.Footnote 72
Although this is the prevailing historical understanding of such initiatives, there has been pushback. Historian Paul Theobold has argued that the undemocratic nature of these reforms is overstated, suggesting in his study of rural education in the Midwest that “there was never any attempt by ‘arrogant and overconfident professionals’ to deny the right of allegedly excessively democratic farmers to sit on township boards,” and casting “doubt on the traditional explanation that local farmers were resisting township consolidation to protect neighborhood democracy.”Footnote 73 Tracy Steffes has argued further that state intervention in rural education often “depended to a large degree on local effort, initiative, and cooperation.”Footnote 74 The New York story bolsters these revisionists. The testimony of rural New Yorkers like L. H. McCluen or Mrs. Willis G. Mitchell, who traveled to Albany to inform Republican Assembly Speaker H. Edmund Machold of the “deplorable condition” of her region's country schools, demonstrates that reformers successfully mobilized at least some indigenous enthusiasm for their agenda—and popular appeals remained relevant since the voluntary provisions of the consolidation law ultimately left reform in the hands of such voters.Footnote 75 Additionally, far from being dominated by technocratic interlopers, the new central district boards of education continued to feature local figures (farmer McCluen was a member of the Trumansburg board by 1930).Footnote 76
District Five Schoolhouse, Ridge Road (U.S. Route 104), Childs, Orleans County, New York. Constructed in 1849, this one-room cobblestone school operated until 1952, when it closed due to centralization.
On a more rudimentary level, more rural students were staying in school. In 1930, only 45.7 percent of New York's “rural farm boys” aged sixteen to seventeen attended school; by 1940, that figure had increased to 61.7 percent, and by 1950 it was 64.3 percent among seventeen-year-olds and 74.8 percent among sixteen-year-olds. In 1930, the rate had stood 3.6 percentage points below the national average, but by 1940 New York was 8.7 points ahead of the nation, and that figure remained similarly high in 1950. New York's “rural farm girls,” whose numbers compared more favorably to national statistics from the start, also showed a sharp increase in attendance over time.Footnote 77
Enthusiasm for New York's reforms was not limited to longitudinal studies or to conferences in Syracuse. Indeed, contemporary accolades for the new central school districts of rural New York came from well beyond the Empire State. In 1930, five years after the initiation of consolidation, the Minnesota-based periodical Farmer's Wife made a study of the central school district in Lewis, New York. The article noted that the district had added “better teachers,” library books, and improved buildings—some of which had enjoyed “more repairs … in one year than in twenty years previous.” The most significant change in Lewis, the magazine found, was the provision of a high school. “Formerly there was none and any farm boy or girl who wanted more than an eighth grade education had to go to Boonville, an average distance of fifteen miles away, live there most of the week, pay tuition and board, and make long trips to and from home every week-end. It was so discouraging that only one in twenty children ever went to high school.” But with the introduction of a central district high school with transportation, “fifteen in twenty children go.” At the new school, “the teachers are all college graduates,” and the students had the benefit of “well-lighted, well-equipped class rooms and laboratories,” an auditorium, and a gymnasium. Children in Lewis were now “getting as good an education as that offered in most small cities.”Footnote 78
This equalization of opportunity was the result not only of consolidation but of the broader state-level push for reform—especially when it came to finances. Farmer's Wife concluded that “all the advantages which have resulted from the central school plan … are possible because of two developments. One is the change from the small school district to a larger unit of administration. … The other is state support.”Footnote 79
Governor Smith had not personally developed this plan, yet he had adopted it without qualification because it provided one method of implementing his social welfare vision in long-neglected reaches of the state. Moreover, by assuming statewide leadership of the issue, Smith transformed the sometimes particularistic agenda of professional educators into a key piece of a broader program (for example, he pressed simultaneously—with equal vigor and with similar success—for substantial improvements to rural health care).Footnote 80 This had profound consequences: Smith's view of both urban and rural school reforms as a progressive means of equalizing opportunity, and his contextualization of those reforms as part of a larger transformation of New York State, meant that these apparently formulaic proposals were not being pursued as a means of imposing the will of élites on “un-American” city-dwellers or “backward” farm folk. The state's fundamental purpose was not to change people, but to ease their socioeconomic burdens; this in turn meant that reforms would always hinge on a robust financial commitment from Albany. Within the specific progressive vision of Governor Smith and his allies, the state was to invest heavily in the health and welfare of all New Yorkers. Education lay at the heart of this vision, uniting the experiences of city and country.
III
If the battle to use state funds to raise teachers’ salaries marked the opening act in Smith's education program, and his initiatives on rural school reform its climax, the fight to appropriate generously for the advancement of education was the dramatic conclusion to this aspect of his gubernatorial regime. Built upon the recommendations of another executive commission and codified through controversial legislation, Smith delivered the coup de grâce for the ancient, atomized, miserly approach to public education in New York State during his fourth term in the governor's mansion.
New York's rural schools dominated education policymaking during the 1924 and 1925 legislative sessions. Indeed, in 1925 the same legislature that had approved the Central Rural Schools Act adopted a parallel measure for equalizing school finances, especially for poor rural districts. The Cole-Rice Law of 1925 distributed state funding based on the number of “teacher units” in a given district and reduced these grants as the real value of property in the district increased—thus tying state support to need by considering both the size of a given school system and the district's capacity for local taxation. This was a “historic” development in school finance to be sure, but in fact the “much heralded” law was almost immediately the subject of significant alteration.Footnote 81 Once again, Governor Smith's grander vision of the state's role in promoting social progress helped engender a more liberal approach to the schools.
In his 1924 message to the legislature, Smith again articulated his basic attitude toward education: “The stability of the State and its institutions depends upon the enlightenment of its people, and this can only be attained by the effective maintenance of a system of public schools in which all the children of the State may receive educational opportunity.” This vision of democratic citizenship was to be buttressed through generous appropriations: “However great the cost and burdensome the tax … We must be liberal in our treatment of the public schools.” Yet circumstances were such that “the cost of maintaining our public schools is, like the cost of everything else, increasing greatly.”Footnote 82 This was creating a fiscal nightmare for the many local units of administration, including the small rural districts, but also including large cities—for example, by the mid-1920s, Buffalo faced a deficit of $7 million, and Rochester faced a $1.5 million shortfall, each precipitated by school expenses.Footnote 83 Citing the budgetary concerns of New York City officials, Smith vetoed legislation in 1925 and 1926 sponsored by Assemblyman Joseph F. Ricca, a Brooklyn Republican, which would have compelled the city to increase teacher and administrator salaries out of municipal funds—declaring each time that he supported pay raises but that he favored alternative legislation to provide state money to help offset the costs to New York and other municipalities, which were unable to appropriate adequately for education out of local revenues.Footnote 84
Smith's response to these accumulating localized challenges was twofold: he demanded that the state “cannot … withhold its full support” from the local districts, and he committed his administration to a study of urban school finances, which he would then submit to municipal governments and state educational authorities.Footnote 85 In October of 1925 Governor Smith reiterated his call “to discuss sources of taxation and problems of financing education” in the state's large cities. On November 6, an executive conference resolved that the governor should appoint a “commission of fifteen” to study financing and administration of urban schools.Footnote 86
The following spring, the commission, headed by Colonel Michael Friedsam (and thus dubbed the “Friedsam Commission”), reported that local funds could not “provide the necessary revenues for maintaining the public schools,” and that as such, “the main reliance for their support must rest in the State.” The commission admonished Albany to raise its contribution to local schools from the $54 million budgeted for fiscal year 1926 to a more robust $89 million by fiscal year 1929. Moreover, it rather audaciously counseled the state to finance this largesse through increased inheritance taxes, a tax on gasoline, a tax on unincorporated businesses, increased franchise taxes on corporations, or an increase in the personal income tax.Footnote 87 While the commission's conclusions were bold and controversial, Smith embraced the report unequivocally. Smith's hearty endorsement of the commission's proposals (“the report … will for many years be a standard of guidance for Legislative action on educational finance and administration”), as well as the vigorous support of state education officials, was, however, not enough to overcome the skepticism of most Republican legislators, and the measures failed to pass the assembly.Footnote 88
Defeat in 1926 did not, though, doom the commission's proposals. Rural school reforms had of course failed twice prior to the 1924 gubernatorial election, during which Smith made the question a central campaign issue, painted his opponents as obstructionists and reactionaries, won a decisive victory, and obtained his legislative druthers from the succeeding assembly. The same general pattern emerged for the finance bills, which failed in the spring of 1926, on the eve of Smith's final campaign for reelection.
Once again the governor mobilized popular opinion on behalf of his education agenda. During a major speech at Utica on October 20, 1926, Smith, campaigning for a historic fourth term as governor, boasted of his record of lavish financing for education. But the incumbent, “not entirely satisfied” with legislative allotments to the localities for schools, maintained that the proposals of the Friedsam Commission must be enacted to continue the progress initiated with his teacher pay bills of 1919 and 1920. Furthermore, he dared his Republican challenger, Congressman Ogden Mills, to articulate a position on the commission's proposals, demanding “a plain ‘yes’ or ‘no.’” The next day, at Troy, Smith continued this line of attack, stating: “I have stood behind the Board of Regents, and the Commissioner of Education, in every single suggestion that they have made for the up-building of what I believe to be the greatest educational system that any commonwealth in the country can boast of.” He contrasted this support with the frugality of legislative Republicans and the reticence of Congressman Mills. Mills retorted by calling Smith a liar (“the Governor could never have delivered the speech he did last night with one hand on the Bible”) and avoided taking a position on the Friedsam recommendations.Footnote 89
Smith's fervent political support for the proposals of the Friedsam Commission revealed the extent of his commitment to an active government role in improving people's lives through the schools. The governor's dedication to these progressive beliefs was exemplified in his endorsement of two particularly controversial mechanisms for the adequate funding of public education: a dramatically enhanced role for the state in an erstwhile local concern, and increased taxes to finance this endeavor. As in 1924, the voters sided with Smith. At the following assembly session, the finance program, in the form of the Dick-Rice Bill of 1927, was approved, adding $16.5 million to the state's education budget. Smith proudly compared the $82.5 million state appropriation for education in 1927 to the $9 million for the same purpose in his first year in office, cautioning the press, “When you hear our political friends talking about ‘the great spender at Albany,’ let's stop and study the amount of money the State is spending for education.”Footnote 90 To the satisfied governor, these statistics represented the fulfillment of his basic principle that the state must promote the welfare of its citizens through universal access to quality education.
***
When Al Smith gained the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1928, he was supported by a number of important national progressive figures—among them John Dewey, the progressive thinker most commonly associated with school reforms. In explaining his position, Dewey did not discuss education. Instead, he suggested that Smith's “election—and even his campaign if he is not elected—will have a humanizing social effect,” focusing much of his analysis on what he saw as Republican hypocrisy over prohibition and scurrilous attacks on Smith's Roman Catholicism. Yet within this tepid endorsement, Dewey also identified the most important component of Smith's progressivism: “While … I do not expect much in the way of facing fundamental issues from the Democratic party, Mr. Smith's record as Governor is proof of the fact that a humane and sympathetic spirit will at least color their treatment as far as his influence can extend.”Footnote 91
In New York State under Alfred E. Smith, high quality public education represented a prime manifestation of the governor's “humane and sympathetic” attitude toward government—and schools became the keystone of his progressive social welfare regime. Smith prioritized education to such a degree that the program became inextricably linked to his entire reform agenda, both in practice and philosophically. Education reform was a central facet of the governor's broad vision for New York: modern, well-funded schools were to operate hand-in-glove with expanded access to recreation, protective labor laws, and a state commitment to public health and welfare, to produce a more humane rendering of the modern American industrial order.
The story of how Smith and his allies pursued these ends adds to the growing literature on the importance of the states in American educational reform. In particular, robust state financing allowed progressives to pursue school reforms that appeared unrealistically burdensome at the district level. Moreover, the power of the purse helped legitimize a broadened state role in education more generally, allowing state-level actors to implement wider reforms and occasionally circumvent recalcitrant local leadership.
None of this preordained the specific course of events that transpired in New York, however, and so this history also reveals the democratic potential of progressive politics. A long historiographical tradition has savaged the apparent antidemocratic motivations of early twentieth-century reformers—an interpretation of particular resonance among historians of education. More recent literature, which has tempered such conclusions, has nevertheless presented educational progressivism largely as subterfuge to preserve the status quo as against the pursuit of a more profound social reformism. In many situations this was probably true. Yet this study contributes to a different trend in the recent literature—the re-democratization of Progressive Era reform.Footnote 92 Detailed consideration of the education program of Alfred E. Smith, one of the leading progressive politicians of the 1920s, reveals that, within the specific context of an ambitious reformist platform pursued through appeals to public sentiment, school reform could be as dependent on democratic pressures as it was on technocratic maneuvering and as important for constructing a broad social welfare state in the face of industrial-age social upheaval as it was to reinforcing supposedly pinched and coercive middle-class ideals in an era of cultural transition.
In 1920s New York, progressive education proved a vibrantly democratic and fundamentally reformist initiative. When Governor Smith—the most powerful and prominent politician in the state—adopted education as a foremost priority, he transformed it into a popular cause, pursued it through democratic mechanisms, and implemented it in accordance with a broader social welfare agenda. Contextualizing these reforms within Smith's larger vision reveals that in this case, rather than functioning as a substitute for social justice, school reform constituted the very essence of progressive statecraft.
