FROM INDEPENDENCE TO SECURITY
Education and Democracy from the Nation’s Founding
In 1894, a committee formed by the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents issued a report exonerating Professor Richard T. Ely, under investigation for his support of the right of workers to unionize. The report proclaimed, “The great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.” Ely’s work stemmed from an imperative, in Wisconsin, for public higher education to help solve the problems of the late nineteenth century. Indeed, prominent intellectuals in the state had begun to see the role such institutions could play in mitigating the economic inequality and labor turmoil brought on by industrial capitalism. John Bascom, as the president of the University of Wisconsin from 1874 to 1887, for instance, advocated the social gospel notion of Christian brotherhood. During his tenure, Bascom supported women’s suffrage, labor unions (including workers’ right to strike), democratic land distribution, and other social democratic reforms. Bascom believed the work of the faculty should reach beyond the confines of the university to shape political reforms. Legendary Progressive reformer Robert LaFollette, among others, credited Bascom’s presidency with setting the groundwork for a university that helped make the state freer and more democratic.
In the twentieth century, the University of Wisconsin deepened its commitment to the notion that universities should help to further social democracy. Advocated by University of Wisconsin president Charles Van Hise (1903–18), the “Wisconsin Idea” asserted the university had an obligation to produce and disseminate knowledge to enhance the lives of every citizen in the state. Combined with the work of legislators like Governor (and later Senator) LaFollette and Charles McCarthy, the founder of the state’s Legislative Research Bureau, the notion also meant that social democratic legislation to enhance economic and social rights should be informed by evidence-based research.1 The state built on the Wisconsin Idea by implementing worker’s compensation (1911) and in 1932 providing unemployment insurance (both firsts in the nation). Wisconsin intellectuals like the economists John Commons and Edwin Witte informed national policies, and the Social Security Act in 1935 was influenced by Wisconsin reforms.2
As the rise of the Wisconsin Idea illustrates, for much of the nation’s history, prominent American intellectuals and policymakers saw public education as doing much more than preparing students for jobs. In the early years of American history, those who advocated for investment in public education—like Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson—did so as part of a broader project of developing the capacity of American citizens by ensuring their political independence. As part of this effort, Jefferson and others also sought to facilitate the economic independence of more white American men. This project was far from perfect: it grossly violated the sovereignty of Native Americans and accommodated and even expanded chattel slavery, and the role of white women was limited to that of mothers who would instruct future male citizens.
Nevertheless, this imperative continued into the era of the market revolution, where the growth of wage labor began to diminish the potential of economic independence for a greater number of Americans. The impulse to develop capable American citizens, moreover, advanced a more egalitarian version of public education in the early years of the nineteenth century, even if it also sought sometimes to discipline those who toiled in an increasingly unforgiving market capitalism. In fact, the most prominent American champions of public education in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not view it primarily, or at all, in terms of its ability to develop what economists would later call “human capital.” Indeed, the United States became an early pioneer in advancing public education largely because political and intellectual leaders believed it was necessary to cultivate common American culture and political democracy.
By the late nineteenth century, industrialization and the proliferation of wage labor created the so-called labor problem: who would do the work driving American capitalism and under what terms. This was the problem to which Bascom, Ely, LaFollette, and others responded in constructing the Wisconsin Idea, and moving forward, this problem was arguably the most significant in American history until World War II. Indeed, as Americans sought social democratic solutions to the class conflict brought on by the Gilded Age, public education ended up as a key arena for social and economic intervention, particularly since employers resisted collective bargaining and social welfare laws that could have altered the balance of power between workers and their employers and offered more job security.3
Some reformers, like philosopher John Dewey and teacher union activist Margaret Haley, saw public education as the preeminent avenue for developing new generations of citizens capable of democratizing both the American economy and its political system. Not everyone viewed public education’s role so broadly, however. In fact, other reformers sought to use public education for the purpose of social control, or aimed to reduce poverty by giving workers greater skills, which they believed were necessary to enhance wages and working conditions. During the first third of the twentieth century, therefore, the seeds of the education myth were planted, and more working people began to consciously seek greater access to public education as one path toward economic livelihood. Nevertheless, education did not represent the only, or even the primary, effort of working people to fight for economic security. Between the Civil War and the Great Depression, workers lost more often than they won. But they fought for various versions of broad social democracy—like collective bargaining, minimum wage and maximum hours laws, and other reforms—sometimes through unions and sometimes through the state. Indeed, the expectations of many reform-oriented workers, intellectuals, and other activists revolved around enhancing broader forms of social and economic rights, of which public education was only one part.
Education, Social Democracy, and the Early Republic
When the United States was forged from its rebellion against the British Empire, the nation’s founding document of 1776 was structured around a promise that has transcended American history. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the Declaration of Independence asserted, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Indeed, the Declaration did not simply call for a change in government; it promised a much more expansive vision of constructing a society that prioritized equality and human well-being.4
Some American political actors saw this promise more narrowly. Southern delegations to the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, for example, were primarily concerned with maintaining their rights to own enslaved people. But other architects of the nation understood that securing the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness meant state and federal governments would need to facilitate both economic independence and other qualities they believed necessary for Americans to act as citizens as a democracy. They certainly did not see enslaved people as independent, and women, the founders assumed, lacked full political agency too. Further, while Pennsylvania’s constitution of 1776 allowed all men to vote without property qualifications, most state constitutions initially restricted the franchise to those who owned property. Property—whether land or an artisanal shop—allowed one to avoid depending on someone else for an economic livelihood, and by this logic, only an independent citizen could be trusted to make reasoned political decisions.
Some American thinkers and policymakers in the founding generation recognized that government could be used to facilitate economic independence, and therefore citizenship, by providing more Americans with land. There was also popular pressure to expand land ownership. In fact, opening land on the frontier was among the major reasons American colonists revolted against the British crown as King George III forbade them from acquiring land west of the Proclamation line of 1763. Of course, Americans repeatedly violated Native American sovereignty, often through military force, in their ruthless acquisition of these new lands, and the United States has still yet to come anywhere close to rectifying the consequences of that dispossession. Federal policies like the Land Ordinance of 1785, the Louisiana Purchase (1803), and the Homestead Act of 1862, nonetheless, were predicated on the notion that opening new opportunities for nonelite, white American citizens was paramount.5 In fact, an early draft of Virginia’s constitution authored by Thomas Jefferson proposed every citizen be entitled to fifty acres of land, and thus the right to vote.6 For Jefferson, economic independence ensured enough citizens would have the political independence—not pressured from someone to whom one sold their labor—to ensure a thriving democracy.7
Thomas Paine, the revolution’s most radical thinker, took the argument even further, envisioning a broad social democracy. In Agrarian Justice (1797), Paine argued for a 10 percent inheritance tax on those with estates, which would pay for a national fund to compensate everyone with a cash payment that would stake them when they turned twenty-one. Paine argued his plan would strengthen the nation, as it would “consolidate the interest of the Republic with that of the individual. To the numerous class dispossessed of their natural inheritance by the system of landed property it will be an act of national justice.”8 Though Paine’s plan was never adopted in the United States, it inspired activists in the nineteenth century, particularly as working people began to assert the right to economic security after being forced by industrial capitalism into wage labor.9
Not only was facilitating economic independence important to the founding generation, but prominent political leaders also argued for public investment in education to provide Americans the knowledge and disposition for democratic citizenship. Indeed, many state constitutions highlighted the importance of an educated citizenry, and the founding generation developed plans to expand access.10 As Jefferson put it in his 1778 proposal for public schools in Virginia, investment in education was essential in maintaining self-government by ensuring ordinary citizens knew “ambition under all its shapes, and [were] prompt[ed] to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.” As the future president argued, not only would public education allow a more informed citizenry to learn from historical examples in which tyranny had threatened, but it would also ensure “those persons, whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue” were educated “at the common expence of all.”11
Jefferson proposed a school for every county in Virginia and all children, male and female, would be entitled to three years of tuition-free education that included reading, writing, arithmetic. He also envisioned that those male students who did especially well—“the best and most promising genius and disposition”—would receive additional public support, and some would even receive three years of study at the College of William and Mary. Clearly Jefferson hoped the education system would cultivate meritocracy, a fiction that would drive more and more American economic and social policies by the end of the twentieth century. Further, Jefferson, reflecting the views of most white Americans at the time, believed that only some people were able to rise to such heights, as he believed neither African Americans nor Native Americans were as intelligent as whites.12 Nevertheless, Jefferson’s proposal shows that the purpose of public education in the early republic had almost nothing to do with gaining new economic skills.
Though Jefferson’s proposal for Virginia was rejected in 1779, he was able to push states to invest in public education through Congress’s Land Ordinance of 1785, which he also authored. The ordinance provided that when western lands were divided and settled by Americans, every thirty-sixth section in a 640-acre township should be devoted to funding the construction of a public school. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 further encouraged public education, asserting that “religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”13
Writing around the same time, physician Benjamin Rush also advocated a system of publicly funded education in Pennsylvania. The imperative was “peculiarly necessary,” Rush argued in 1798, because “our citizens are composed of the natives of so many different kingdoms in Europe. Our schools of learning, by producing one general, and uniform system of education, will render the mass of the people more homogeneous, and thereby fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government.” Though he was decidedly not making a feminist argument—Rush believed girls should be trained so they could grow up to instruct new generations of boys in republican values—he also argued for the public provision of education across gender lines.14
Horace Mann’s Nation-Building Project
From the 1810s to 1830s, many American politicians promoted national investment in banking and infrastructure to connect disparate parts of the new nation, enhance the development of American manufacturing, and promote economic growth. This impulse was central to the political platform of the Whig Party, and it is thus not surprising that a Whig politician named Horace Mann became arguably the nation’s most significant advocate for public investment in education. Indeed, Americans often consider the nineteenth century to be one of limited government involvement, but the expansion of public education over the course of the nineteenth century, even if at the state and local level, represented a key piece of a dramatic expansion of government programs.15 Though Democrats sometimes opposed public education as a “Whig” project, the effort for common schools was not exclusively a partisan effort. Still, prodevelopment Whigs like Mann were its main proponents.
Examining Mann’s logic for investing in public education is important. For Mann, as well as other proponents of public education, education was crucial, not to serve as job training, but to ensure that Americans had the knowledge and values to serve as bulwarks of a democratic republic under duress.16 Many elite reformers like Mann sought to use the schools to counteract the growing class divisions, ethnic diversity, and anonymity brought on by market capitalism and urban life.17 A Massachusetts state legislator, Mann took the position of secretary of the State Board of Education in 1837. Maintaining the position for twelve years, Mann not only compiled yearly reports to the legislature, but he also lectured at annual Massachusetts county education conventions in the late 1830s and 1840s. In these venues, Mann lobbied for expanding funding for new and better schoolhouses, textbooks, libraries, and teachers.
In 1837, for instance, Mann breathlessly asserted the importance of education both for preserving the American Revolution’s legacy and for stanching social unrest. “Such an event as the French Revolution,” he argued, “never would have happened with free schools; any more than the American Revolution would have happened without them. The mobs, the riots, the burnings, the lynchings, perpetrated by the men of the present day, are perpetrated, because of their vicious or defective education, when children.” Expanding public education would ensure young people learned the proper republican virtue so they would respect order, act selflessly, and make rational decisions.18 If they wished to sustain the nation, Mann lectured Americans in 1839, their political system would need much more conscious attention to public education: “If republican institutions do wake up unexampled energies in the whole mass of a people, and give them implements of unexamined power wherewith to work out their will, then these same institutions ought also to confer upon that people unexampled wisdom and rectitude.”19
It wasn’t until Mann’s fifth annual report to the legislature, in 1842, that he even mentioned the economic benefits of education, and then only reluctantly. Chastising the Massachusetts towns that did not sufficiently invest in their schools, Mann pointed out that education brought economic benefits, pointing out that more knowledge could “raise more abundant harvests, and multiply the conveniences of domestic life . . . a single new idea is often worth more to an individual than a hundred workmen—and to a nation, than the addition of provinces to its territory.”20
Mann’s evidence included letters from a handful of employers showing that “other things being equal . . . those who have been blessed with a good Common School education, rise to a higher and a higher point, in the kinds of labor performed, and also in the rate of wages paid, while the ignorant sink, like dregs, and are always found at the bottom.” Of course, Mann missed the reality that those who came from a family with the luxury of having their children attend school likely had other advantages, such as better nutrition and health, or simply the possibility of seeking higher wages elsewhere because their economic reality may have been less dire. Further, the educator’s assumption in the exercise was that a large portion of the workers’ greater economic benefit stemmed from their enhanced penchant for “punctuality and fidelity in the performance of their duties,” which likely corresponded to those who had internalized docility toward their bosses. Even so, Mann concluded his report by pointing out that all these economic benefits were secondary, “dwindl[ing] into insignificance when compared with those loftier and more sacred attributes of the cause, which have the power of converting material wealth into spiritual well-being.”21
While Mann’s argument for investing in education clearly revolved around the national political project, by his final annual report, he had begun advancing the notion that access to education could unlock, by itself, economic opportunity. Mann’s twelfth and final report, in fact, represented one of the earliest versions of what would become the education myth. Indeed, as increasing numbers of American working men lost access to their own farms and shops (and thus the political independence valued by the founding generation), Mann responded to the growing class divisions that penetrated American society by asserting the importance of education.
In 1849, Mann argued that if those without property were better educated, they would, almost magically, get along better with those who employed them, which would bring them prosperity. “If education be equably diffused,” he supposed, “it will draw property after it, by the strongest of all attractions; for such a thing never did happen, and never can happen, as that an intelligent and practical body of men should be permanently poor.” Indeed, Mann continued, in highly romantic language:
Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men—the balance-wheel of the social machinery. . . . It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility towards the rich; it prevents being poor. . . . The spread of education, by enlarging the cultivated class or caste, will open a wider area over which the social feelings will expand; and, if this education should be universal and complete, it would do more than all things else to obliterate factitious distinctions in society.
This wasn’t quite an argument for human capital. Mann was not exactly arguing workers would acquire the skills that would bring them to par with capital; rather he was arguing, fancifully, that it would cultivate a disposition that would create common ground with those who employed them.
Still, in many ways Mann’s assertion regarding the value of education sounds strikingly familiar to some of the modern mythologies based on the alchemical nature of “human capital” to overcome social and economic divisions. He clearly wasn’t calling for a broader project to help working people maintain economic independence (or even a bigger share of what the economy produced) at the expense of capital. In fact, Mann feared the “creeds of some political reformers, or revolutionizers . . . that some people are poor because others are rich.” He clearly rejected that explanation. Mann argued instead that “the greatest of all the arts in political economy is, to change a consumer into a producer; and the next greatest is to increase the producer’s producing power;—an end to be directly attained, by increasing his intelligence.”22
Mann, then, clearly sought to maintain the social order, a particular version of what the democratic republic should mean. In many ways, he was naïve and romantic, ignoring the stark realities brought on by market capitalism. The United States in 1849 was on the precipice of a sustained, and often bloody, conflict over the prospects for economic security for those Americans who were not enriched by the dramatic capital accumulation of the next century.
For the growing multitude of Americans who worked for wages as the country transitioned toward market capitalism in Mann’s day, the relationship to public education was complicated. In some cases, workers and working-men’s organizations supported public education, sometimes for the same reasons Jefferson had argued for it: the connection between knowledge and political democracy. In fact, the earliest working-class organizations in American history, forged in the 1820s, were built in part to advance universal public education. The growing market economy in the industrial Northeast impoverished wage laborers and forced children into the workforce. In addition to ensuring children would no longer compete with adults in the labor market, working-men’s organizations demanded state and local governments provide free public education to all children. These calls were often explicitly linked to the impact education would play in ensuring political democracy for new generations of working people. As one working-men’s association, pushing for a system of public education in Philadelphia put it in 1829, put it, “Real liberty and equality have no foundation but in universal and equal instruction.”23 Further, many workers also shared Mann’s notion that education should cultivate republican citizenship, as “artisans” and “mechanics”—the terminology for workers at the time—read political and cultural magazines, belonged to subscription libraries, and attended lyceum lectures.24
On the other hand, some working people opposed the expansion of public education, particularly as reformers used it to push the ideology of the winners in the new market economy. Historian Michael Katz’s classic work on nineteenth-century education reform, for instance, tells the story of Beverly, Massachusetts, whose citizens voted to abolish its high school in 1860. Katz shows that Beverly’s working people led that charge to oppose it while the town’s wealthy supported it, believing high school would provide social mobility. Working-class children, however, rarely attended secondary school, and their parents rejected it as just one facet of a new industrial social order that threatened their livelihoods with ever more precarious wage labor.25
Finally, because education served the purpose of constructing American citizenship, it is particularly significant that many white Americans intentionally excluded African Americans. Indeed, free African Americans sought enhanced access to education just as many white working people did during the mid-nineteenth century. Blacks, especially in the urban North, developed schools and sustained reading clubs and lyceums, and they did so with the anticipation of equal American citizenship. Many whites, however, fiercely opposed these efforts. Indeed, the growing expectation that white children should have access to schools in the North was fundamentally constructed on the premise of excluding African Americans. Just as the expansion of the franchise to nonproperty-holding whites in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s was accompanied by efforts to strip voting rights from African Americans, so in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, and elsewhere the expansion of public education for whites was linked to limiting the education of Blacks.26 It would take more than a century of activism for African Americans to successfully force their way into full exercise of citizenship in the United States, and it is no surprise that public education would represent an integral part of that fight.
Higher Education’s Frontier: The Midwest
In the 1840s and 1850s, following the lead of their eastern counterparts, new states in the Midwest began to provide publicly funded grammar schools. For instance, Wisconsinites, many of whom were émigrés from New England, had accepted the notion that investing in public schools was important even before statehood, and when Wisconsin became a state in 1848, its constitution guaranteed a free public education. Indeed, the growth of public schools was dramatic. In 1836, the territory of Wisconsin only had about a dozen schools with about five hundred students; by 1849, there were thirty-two thousand students.27 By pioneering broad access to public universities, Midwestern states went further than their peers on the East Coast. Chartered in 1848 by the new constitution, for instance, the University of Wisconsin began offering classes in 1850.
On the East Coast, colonial legislatures had subsidized private universities—such as Dartmouth, Yale, and Harvard—well before the Revolution. Founders Benjamin Rush, George Washington, Jefferson, and others had pushed for the creation of a national university as early as the 1780s. Though a national university was not forthcoming, state governments in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries began founding public universities, establishing at least the ideal of greater accessibility to higher education if not always the funding to make it happen.28
In Midwestern states like Michigan and Wisconsin, these universities were founded explicitly on the principle that they serve all citizens, not just elites.29 The future state’s territorial legislature in Detroit founded the University of Michigan in 1817 as the culmination of a statewide system of public education, with free primary schools and a very low-tuition university, subsidized by the state. Though it would be a challenge to raise the funds to adequately support this system, the vision was capacious, driven by Jefferson’s notion that education was necessary to develop a strong democratic society. The state’s constitution, ratified in 1835, guaranteed every student access to a common school and obligated the legislature to allocate federal land grant funds to permanently support the university. Henry Tappan, a philosopher who authored a book envisioning higher education as an institution that would offer new generations of Americans a respite from “the excessive commercial spirit” of the market, served as an early and influential president from 1852 to 1863. Though continued resistance to raising taxes prevented Tappan’s efforts to remake the university in this image, the University of Michigan by the 1860s prioritized a widely available, broad education that sought to do much more than empower individual earning potential.30
Similarly, when the Wisconsin legislature chartered its university, proponents of higher education aspired to offer a broad education that would reach as many students as possible. In 1849, the university’s first chancellor, John Lathrop, proclaimed, in an address to about six hundred people in Madison that shut down the entire city, “The American mind has grasped the idea and will not let it go, that the whole property of the state, is holden subject to the sacred trust of providing for the education of every child in the state. Without the adoption of this system, as the most potent compensation of the aristocratic tendencies of hereditary wealth, the boasted political equality of which we dream, is but an illusion. Knowledge is the great leveler. It is the true democracy.”31
Indeed, in the 1850s and 1860s, the university created a number of both liberal and practical offerings. As the Board of Regents pointed out while proposing a Department of the Practical Applications of Science in 1851, doing so would help the entire state by educating those “on whose intelligence and skill depend on the success of the industrial processes, the physical wealth, and the general prosperity of the community.”32 It is vital that we pay attention to this framing when we consider the origins of public education’s imperative in American history. Though education today is seen as being mostly about nurturing individual opportunity, educational leaders in the nineteenth century believed that developing Americans’ new skills opened the broader potential for the common good even when institutions offered “practical” training.
Independence versus the Slave Power
As states outside the South expanded public education in order to enhance both economic independence and citizenship (at least for whites), slaveowners in the southern states sought a much more hierarchical future. Contrary to various myths about our nation’s history—that the conflict was primarily about state sovereignty or that it was a moral quandary over slavery—the sectional conflict arising between North and South before the Civil War was rooted in a fundamental political economic tension. Though important activists, most prominently Frederick Douglass, argued African Americans deserved to be fully fledged American citizens, the growing rivalry between North and South in the 1840s and 1850s centered almost exclusively on the future of economic independence for white people. A good deal of this vision regarding independence revolved around public education.
One constituency—the southern “slave power,” which had acquired unprecedented wealth by extracting labor from enslaved human beings—sought to use lands stolen from Mexico after President James K. Polk provoked a war in 1846 to expand slavery. The other constituency, led by Republicans like Abraham Lincoln, were motivated by the Jeffersonian notion of economic independence through access to land and the idea that economic value derived primarily from labor. They believed the slave power needed to be curtailed to ensure independence for a greater number of American citizens. For some the argument for economic independence took on a nakedly white supremacist premise, while for others like Lincoln, an alternative version offered space to include African Americans, too, even if on unequal terms.
Some northern Democrats, such as Pennsylvania representative David Wilmot, for instance, argued new American lands should not be open to slavery since they would close off opportunity for white men. He had no interest in liberating African Americans, however: “I have no squeamish sensitiveness upon the subject of slavery, nor morbid sympathy for the slave. I plead the cause of the rights of white freemen. I would preserve for free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.”33
The notion that western lands should not be given over to the slave power was the fundamental tension that led to the growing sectional conflict of the 1850s. Although some Democrats like Wilmot could abide the existence of slavery so long as it didn’t foreclose opportunities for whites, others—the founders of the GOP—understood slavery as an abomination to be eliminated. Still, though Lincoln and some other Republicans were unwilling to permanently accommodate the existence of slavery, they were also primarily concerned with what the expansion of slavery meant for the economic independence of white men squeezed out of landownership and into wage labor.
Lincoln’s 1854 speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Act at Peoria, Illinois, highlights this argument. The bill had essentially invalidated the Missouri Compromise, which in 1820 had relegated slavery to areas south of Missouri as the nation acquired new land. Sponsored by Lincoln’s rival, Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, the law allowed the citizens of the Kansas and Nebraska territories to vote on whether to permit slavery. As Lincoln explained, the law threatened the nation’s promise of independence for free white citizens. Beginning with the Northwest Ordinance’s restriction on slavery, Lincoln pointed out that those states “are now what Jefferson foresaw and intended—the happy home of teeming millions of free, white, prosperous people, and no slave amongst them.” Denouncing the bill, the future president argued, “Slave States are places for poor white people to remove FROM; not to remove TO. New free States are the places for poor people to go to and better their condition. For this use, the nation needs these territories.”34
Lincoln, therefore, opposed slavery and wished to abolish it at the beginning of the Civil War, but as president, he would move only gradually to eliminate it as the war ground on, although the momentum for abolition would pick up speed after African Americans troops became integral to the war effort. To Lincoln, the war was fundamentally about the trajectory of economic and political independence, predominately for whites. Perhaps the best statement of this reality is Lincoln’s address to Congress in December 1861. In his speech Lincoln mainly gave an account of the war effort in its first year, but he concluded by laying out a vision, just as many of the founders had, in which political democracy relied on economic independence for ordinary citizens.
The Confederacy, Lincoln argued, was defined by its “war upon the first principle of popular government—the rights of the people.” The new president obviously argued for political democracy, but more importantly, he raised a “warning voice against this approach of returning despotism” stemming from the premise that “capital” should be placed “on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government.” On the contrary, however, Lincoln asserted that “labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” He then pointed out that the nation should serve to ensure working men access to economic independence: “No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty; none less inclined to take or touch aught which they have not honestly earned. Let them beware of surrendering a political power which . . . will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them till all of liberty shall be lost.”35 In an earlier iteration of these remarks in Wisconsin in 1859, Lincoln also linked free labor and economic independence to learning, arguing, “In one word free labor insists on universal education.” And, importantly, the necessity of education transcended economic value: “Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us, and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness.”36
As Lincoln had pointed out on multiple occasions, including in his debates with Stephen Douglas in the 1858 US Senate race in Illinois, he did not see whites and Blacks as equals, but he nonetheless believed that African Americans deserved to enjoy the fruits of their labor. In fact, in 1860, he argued the US government should ensure their right to economic independence too: “I want every man to have a chance—and I believe a black man is entitled to it—in which he can better his condition—when he may look forward and hope to be hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him!”37
Lincoln envisioned a world in which those who labored could earn their way to independence, that public education could facilitate citizenship, and that government could facilitate that journey. It is thus not surprising that a crucial piece of the Republican agenda was the Homestead Act, signed into law by the president in 1862 after secession removed southern Democratic obstructionists from Congress. Providing 160-acre plots for an inexpensive fee, the law settled, once and for all, the question of whether the West should serve to advance slavery or to facilitate the economic independence of American citizens. Though the vast majority of the millions of acres of land (1.5 million acres by 1864 alone) distributed would go to white families, African Americans were not excluded from its promise, and thousands were able to access land under those terms.38 Further, although the Homestead Act was woefully insufficient in arresting the trajectory of a capitalism that subordinated more and more Americans to the whims of large corporations, it is nonetheless significant that the effort, at least in theory, prioritized the economic independence of individual Americans.
Support for public education also played a significant role in the Republican vision: in the legislative session of 1861–63, after passing the Homestead Act, Congress also enacted the Morrill Act (1862), a concerted effort to build public higher education in the United States. The law provided thirty thousand acres of federal land to every state for each of its representatives in Congress, the proceeds of which would allow each to “promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.” After passing the Morrill Act, as one historian has pointed out, the United States thus became “the first nation in the world, whether in peace or in war, systematically to commit its resources for the support of higher education.”39 Congressional action clearly meant to advance the total education of Americans, and while such development could certainly benefit an individual’s human capital, the language of the law tells us that the goal was the broad development of each state’s working population.40
Just as had been the case with the Morrill Act, the secession of southern Democrats, who put their own interests in exploiting human property above all else, allowed Congress to establish a federal office of education. A congressional resolution of support for the bill in December 1865 stressed “the universal intelligence of the people” in vouchsafing the country’s future “republican interests.” Further, policymakers clearly envisioned the education office as part of a nationalist project, one that would, at least in theory, include freedmen and freedwomen. Not only was the office designed to “enforce education without regard to color,” but proponents of the bill also contended that “the great disasters which have afflicted the Nation and desolated one-half its territory are traceable, in a great degree, to the absence of common schools and general education among the people of the lately rebellious States.”41
When the Civil War ended, and the new battle for African American rights began in the South, the success of Reconstruction hinged on whether African Americans would be included as full American citizens, and two of the most significant elements of this struggle involved economic independence and education. Indeed, as early as 1863, Lincoln had moved beyond touting earlier, now historically embarrassing, colonization schemes to send free African Americans to Africa, and by 1865 called for those states that had seceded to educate Blacks.42
In 1865, William Tecumseh Sherman, as a wartime expedient, issued Field Order No. 15, providing African Americans in South Carolina and Georgia forty-acre plots of land that had been abandoned by plantation owners and raising African Americans’ expectations for permanent land ownership. Blacks expected the Reconstruction project after the war to compensate their years of unpaid labor and loyalty to the union in the form of independence through land ownership.43 Tragically, a combination of outright white supremacy from President Andrew Johnson and the ideology of the northern Republicans who ran the Freedman’s Bureau privileged the property rights of treasonous southern plantation owners, leaving most Blacks without land and dependent on sharecropping, a form of labor exploitation bordering on outright theft.44
Just as was the case for white Americans, African Americans defined equality through both economic independence and education, and the federal government’s lack of commitment to either would prevent Blacks from exercising full citizenship. For a time—and not coincidentally that time coexisted with federal guarantees of Black political rights—African Americans successfully pushed toward an expanded education system in the South capable of providing education on par with that of whites. Ensuring political and economic “self-sufficiency” in the postwar order represented the primary motivation for Blacks in the South seeking education. After the federal government pulled out and white supremacists “redeemed” the southern states, however, Black children went to school in segregated, subpar institutions, and though African American communities heroically paid twice for their schools (once for the taxes that disproportionately subsidized white schools, and another time, voluntarily, to give their kids some semblance of what they lacked from public funds), Blacks continued to be excluded from the broader promise of American democracy.45
The End of Independence
As Reconstruction came to its tragic conclusion, the “labor problem” emerged as the nation’s most important political issue. Indeed, the very year the US Army pulled its remaining troops out of the South (1877), a labor conflict of epic proportions underscored just how woefully insufficient was the Lincoln Republicans’ vision of facilitating economic and political independence through land and education. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877—precipitated by four years of economic downturn—highlighted the anger of the growing number of wage laborers who, to use Lincoln’s words in 1861, would be “fixed to that condition for life.” As more workers faced a lifetime of wage labor, they increasingly fought for social democracy: new economic and social rights that would protect them from the predations of a marketplace dominated by industrial capital. The battles lines drawn from the 1870s on no longer revolved around the potential of economic independence, but instead on the means through which workers could secure an economic livelihood.46
The forms the conflict over the “labor problem” took were many, and they have been amply documented by historians.47 For skilled workers, the effort hinged on control of the shopfloor. Employers sought to de-skill this work and make (mostly male) workers either interchangeable or to break their ability to organize. Perhaps the most spectacular example of this conflict is the Carnegie Steel Works’ violent efforts to break the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers in Homestead, Pennsylvania, in 1892. Other workers’ organizations, such as the Knights of Labor in the 1880s, the American Railway Union in the 1890s, and the Industrial Workers of the World in the early twentieth century sought broader, industrywide organization. Sometimes, workers brought the fight, as the Knights (and some of their remnants) did, into the broader terrain of urban politics. The high-water mark of the Knights’ power, in fact, coincided with a coordinated effort in 1886 to force employers in Chicago, Milwaukee, and elsewhere to agree to an eight-hour day for all workers.
After the crippling depression of 1893, Jacob Coxey’s march on Washington, DC, stands out at as an important example of early, radical calls for social democracy. In 1894, Coxey, unemployed workers, and others marched from Ohio to Washington, DC, to compel the federal government to create jobs through public works. Though the police crushed the protest, it highlighted a protean demand for the federal government to take a role in providing economic security for working people.48 Farmers, through the populist movement, sought an array of social democratic interventions to protect their economic livelihoods: a “sub-treasury system” that would pool small farmers’ selling power so they would receive higher prices for their crops, a graduated income tax, and public ownership of the railroads and the telegraph so private companies couldn’t exploit farmers who relied on that knowledge and transportation infrastructure.49
Political reformers, from both the working classes and the growing middle class, during the Progressive Era sought policies to improve workers’ economic security through maximum hour laws, worker safety laws, or social insurance like workman’s compensation and unemployment insurance (all of these aspects of the New Deal were developed through various state laws first). In part, middle-class reformers participated in these efforts because they understood their moral necessity. But, reformers also sought these social democratic interventions because they feared overt class war and instead sought to suppress class conflict by engaging in reform movements in which moderate government interventions could alleviate some of the most glaring inequalities.50
Rethinking Schools, Remaking Society
There were two major efforts—from two very different directions—to remake education during the Progressive Era, and both sought to use education to solve some of the major problems brought on by the rise of industrial capitalism. First, some reformers sought to make the school system more vocational. In fact, the vocationalism movement of the early twentieth century was the first concerted effort in American history to push schools to serve the primary purpose of providing young people the skills they supposedly needed to succeed in the workplace. At best, these efforts responded to the legitimate demands of some working people for skills that would allow them access to better jobs in an increasingly complex economy. At worst, vocationalism sought to remake the American school system into one that was explicitly tiered, replicating the class inequalities in the rest of society. The second set of efforts sought to democratize the education system in order to strengthen American democracy. At best, these efforts sought to train American citizens to take political action against the antidemocratic political economy of the Gilded Age. At worst, these efforts perpetuated negative caricatures of immigrant working people, employing public education for the purpose of social control.
Neither of these reform movements fully remade American education. The vocationalist ideal gained traction, but the nationalist imperative of education for the sake of democracy persisted beyond the 1930s too. Further, while public education as a broad democratic response to the problems of industrialization grew in prominence during the early twentieth century, it comprised just one part of a growing social democratic argument for economic security.
It is important to examine both movements in more detail, beginning with the push by reformers to make education more responsive to the needs of employers. In Chicago, in the 1890s and early 1900s, for example, some Progressive reformers, in alliance with business interests, attempted to create a two-tiered public education system in which the city’s working-class children would receive a stripped-down “practical” curriculum, while middle-class and elite children would continue with a liberal education. Labor unions in Chicago, including the Chicago Teachers’ Federation, the nation’s first teacher union, successfully resisted this effort. The opposition of unions to this plan didn’t mean workers necessarily opposed using schools to impart job skills, however. Whereas employers often sought to narrow the curriculum toward training for a specific job, unions in Chicago, Boston, and elsewhere supported certain kinds of vocational education as long as it was broadly applicable to a lot of different jobs and didn’t undermine efforts by unions to have some control over the job market.51
In Boston, school reformers in the late nineteenth century increasingly sought to use education to alleviate the economic inequalities brought on by Gilded Age capitalism. As late as the 1880s, aside from a few specific professions, public education was not connected to job training. In the years after, however, reformers assumed workers’ low wages were related to their lack of skills and sought to change the system in a purportedly meritocratic direction. Though many workers, especially immigrants, did benefit from English-language instruction and some, especially women workers, found new job opportunities from public school investments in practical white-collar courses in bookkeeping and typewriting, the new emphasis on gearing public education toward job training failed to significantly alter the economic hierarchy.52
Importantly, however, a growing number of working people who went to school longer in the early twentieth century did so because they sought access to better and more sustainable jobs. For women workers, in particular, high barriers to gain a livelihood in manual labor and the relative weakness of unions in women’s work made education for white-collar labor a rational choice. Indeed, even though reformers failed to turn the US system into one exclusively focused on vocationalism, Americans—especially the increasing number of white-collar workers—were beginning to connect public education to economic opportunity in important ways by the 1920s and 1930s.53
The clear limits, however, to education’s ability to democratize American society on economic terms nonetheless illustrated the necessity of other important social democratic interventions. On a national level, the most important victory for the vocationalist drive during this period was the passage of the Smith-Hughes Act in 1917. With support from both business and organized labor, Smith-Hughes provided funding to states for vocational education. Funding was limited, however, and the law failed to help many students gain higher-paying jobs.54
The most important shift that resulted from the effort to connect workers with better skills was the massive expansion of public high schools from the 1910s to the 1940s. In 1890, less than 10 percent of Americans ages fourteen to seventeen were enrolled in high school. By 1920, that number jumped to 38 percent, and by 1936, it had skyrocketed to 65 percent. More students went to high school in part because of new limits on child labor, and during the Depression more stayed in school simply because there were few jobs available.55 But many students clearly also went to school because their families supposed it would provide greater economic opportunities.
While some economists have argued that more education blunted radical social movements in the early twentieth century, public education did very little to decrease economic inequality.56 For one thing, the expansion of high schools in the early twentieth century initiated a race for even more credentials. Thus, when more students went to high school in the first third of the twentieth century, students from wealthier families sought greater advantage in the job market by accessing the higher tracks comprehensive high schools now offered, which in turn put them on the path to college.57 Further, labor conflict in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s was immense, and employers fought tooth and nail to prevent working people, whether they had a high school degree or not, from attaining economic security.
During this era, another group of Progressives sought to democratize American politics through citizenship education and, even more broadly, by reforming public schools to help students develop greater civic and political capabilities. Progressive intellectual and educator John Dewey was the most important proponent of this effort.58 In Dewey’s most significant work, Democracy and Education (1916), he explained that a “democratically constituted society” required an essential interest in education, as common schools could teach students to be active social agents in an interdependent world. In fact, Dewey believed work would be “reduced to a mechanical routine unless workers see the technical, intellectual, and social relationships involved in what they do, and engage in their work because of the motivation furnished by such perceptions.”59 Indeed, Dewey believed more educated workers could build agency in the workplace (elsewhere he also wrote about the importance of unions in this endeavor) to forestall employers’ efforts to reduce their workday to mindless drudgery.
There were a number of other American thinkers who subscribed to Dewey’s vision for reforming American education, but perhaps the best example of his reach can be found in the thought of Margaret Haley, an early leader of the nation’s first teacher union, the Chicago Teachers Federation (CTF, founded in 1897). Though the union was initially formed to fight for teachers’ economic security, Haley’s rise to prominence in the union occurred, not coincidentally, as teachers and other working-class people fought off reformers’ efforts to tier the public school system.60
Haley’s thought is illuminating, particularly in her memorable articulation of what public education should do in “Why Teachers Should Organize” at the annual meeting of the National Education Association (NEA) in 1904.61 In the speech, Haley cited both Mann and Dewey. She began by pointing out the American people, even a half century after Mann sought common schools, were not fully prepared for democracy. Teachers needed to organize, she argued, so they could ensure they did their part to prepare future citizens. Citing Dewey next, Haley argued American public education would only adequately prepare future citizens for democracy when teachers were treated as experts worthy of leading a democratic school system. Haley’s argument for why teachers should organize, then, showed that teachers were workers like any other, but their work was also to teach other Americans to be citizens in a democracy, a stance that was in opposition to probusiness reformers.62
Public Education, Citizenship, and Immigration
Other American reformers, decidedly less radically democratic than Dewey or Haley, continued to value public education for its use in facilitating citizenship, though some of these efforts explicitly sought social control. The massive increase in immigration to the United States from the 1890s to the 1910s rapidly expanded public school systems, leading to bureaucratic reforms and new efforts to “Americanize” immigrant children in the schools.63 Many American policy-makers felt significant anxiety about the impact of the millions of immigrants who came to the United States from eastern and southern Europe in the years around World War I. As a result Congress passed laws that severely restricted immigration.64 Education reformers sought to use the schools of the early twentieth century to assimilate the children of immigrants, just as Mann envisioned the purpose of common schools in the 1840s. As with Mann, these early twentieth-century reformers sought to teach literacy and citizenship, not job training.65
Examining calls for enhanced federal support for public education helps to illustrate this trend. In 1910, a bill to establish a federal executive level department was the subject of congressional hearings, and in the 1910s and 1920s, a number of similar proposals were introduced into Congress. The Towner-Sterling bill, sponsored by the aptly named Iowa congressional representative Horace Mann Towner, was introduced in 1921. The bill had five primary purposes, as a National Education Association (NEA) publication from 1923 pointed out:
A. Removing illiteracy
B. Americanizing the foreign-born
C. Establishing effective programs of physical education
D. Providing well-qualified teachers for all public schools, and
E. Equalizing educational opportunities within the States.
Expanding public education, the NEA argued, was especially important at that time because World War I had highlighted a fundamental deficiency in the education of Americans. Asserting the importance of facilitating citizenship, the publication pointed out that “the effective exercise of every sovereign power of our National Government is dependent on intelligent, right-minded citizenship. An educated citizenry is the first great need of today, just as it was the first great need of the new Republic in 1789.”66
The NEA believed a greater federal role was necessary because American democracy was threatened by the number of foreign-born “illiterates” entering the country. In language that would make most Americans today cringe, the NEA pointed out that “now that the war is over, hundreds of thousands of aliens are once again entering our country each year.” The publication also highlighted the problem of “illiteracy” among native born Americans, arguing that “the problem is more clearly revealed as principally one of improving our schools.”67 Further, the NEA argued schools in every state must ensure adequate “Americanization” through education, and the bill proposed $7.5 million to states to teach immigrants fourteen years and older about American citizenship and the English language. Indeed, though this law never passed, the debate in Congress, combined with the NEA’s vigorous support, shows that, even in this nativist guise, many American educators viewed public education more for its purpose in developing citizenship than augmenting job skills.68
New Deal Rising
While reformers like Dewey and Haley viewed education in terms of its promise in democratizing society, other Americans, including an increasing number of working people by the 1930s, had begun to view public education’s potential for individual economic opportunity. While schools continued to serve the function of educating citizens for democracy, particularly as educators and other policy-makers feared what immigration would do to the polity, education began to more clearly serve the purpose of advancing economic opportunity too. And yet, this increase in education did little to arrest the war on workers in the 1920s, or the overall lack of rights and economic security for working people, a problem only magnified during the Great Depression. The 1930s changed everything, as new reforms established the ideal that broad economic security would be a driving consideration of American policymakers moving forward.