The Higher Education Generation: World War I and the Truman Commission’s Path to Universal College Access

ABSTRACT

The work of the 1946–1948 President’s Commission on Higher Education was unquestionably influenced by the immediate aftermath of World War II. In this article, we examine the backgrounds and ideas of 10 commissioners to argue that their efforts were also deeply influenced by their experience of a different world war. The 1914–1918 “Great War” was a formative experience for each of the members, shaping their views of sociopolitics, opportunity, and the public purposes of education. Ultimately, these commissioners arrived at the belief that universal college access was the key to ensuring peace and democracy throughout the world. Their product, Higher Education for American Democracy, was anything but a dry federal report. Instead, it was a passionate argument for what higher education ought to be. As such, it closely reflected the lived experiences of its authors, who had been shaped by one shattering conflict, were responding to a second, and were determined to prevent a third.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Historians have used the term modern democracy (or a “modern age”) in different ways. When discussing the rise of “modern” democracy in the United States, historians typically point to the years between 1890 and 1920, the so-called progressive era, as a key moment of change. They also note as a key theme of modern American democracy (as opposed to the European experience) a tension between “individualism” and “social cohesion,” or “self” and “society.” For examples of such works exploring the rise of “modern” American democracy, see Crunden (1972), McClay (1994), Lears (2009), and Wiebe (1995, pp. 113-246).

² Historians have noted the various ways in which the First World War served as a “unifying event for Americans. Stephen Kern (1983), for instance, has described how the development of standard time in the United States in the years before the war established by World War I created a shared “public time” that displaced a “multiplicity of “privates times” in operation in different communities. More broadly, the First World War sparked national debates about the meaning of patriotism and citizenship, raising new questions about what it meant to be an “American” both culturally and legally. See, for instance, Capozzola (2014) and Capozzola (2010).

³ The relationship between mainline Protestantism and progressive reform has been well documented. See, for example, Jewett (2012).

⁴ On the Methodist “social creed,” see Duke (2003), p. 60.

⁵ See, for example, Bromley Oxnam “American Education Has Made Good,” an address to Iowa State Teachers’ Association, November 2, 1939, 16, Box 84, GBO.

⁶ On Kallen and “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot,” see Menand (2001), p. 391.

⁷ See James R. Barrett, “Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States, 1880–1930,” Journal of American History 79, 3 (Dec. 1992): 996.

⁸ See Kallen (1924).

⁹ Kallen wrote about the idea of democracy as a “religion” in the years after his service on the Truman Commission. See Horace M. Kallen, “Democracy’s True Religion,” Saturday Review of Literature, April 1952, Box 52, HMK2. On the Truman Commission’s conception of democracy as a kind of “secular religion,” see Ethan Schrum, “Establishing a Democratic Religion: Metaphysics and Democracy in the Debates Over the President’s Commission on Higher Education” History of Education Quarterly 47, 3 (Aug 2007): 277–301.

¹⁰ The concept of “cultural pluralism” undergirded antiprejudice education movements during the interwar period. See Selig (2008).

¹¹ See, for instance, Meyer (1986). On the contradictions between Meyer’s conservative political views about the role of women in the family and in society and her professional career as an independent journalist and activist, see Eisenmann (2006), p. 141.

¹² On Morgan, see Purcell (2014) and Ris (2022), pp. 283–285.

¹³ Zook’s dissertation appeared as a series of articles in single issue; see the Journal of Negro History 4, 2 (April 1919). On Woodson and his standards for publication in the Journal of Negro History, as well as Zook’s record on race and equality, see Philo Hutcheson, Marybeth Gasman, Kijua Sanders-McMurty, “Race and Equality in the Academy: Rethinking Higher Education Actors and the Struggle for Equality in the Post-World War II Period,” Journal of Higher Education 82: 2 (March/April 2011).

¹⁴ Alfred North Whitehead was an influential figure for many American educations during the interwar period, including several who served on the Truman Commission. In his 1916 essay “The Aims of Education,” Whitehead describes the goal of combining “culture and expert knowledge” in an educational program geared toward preparing students for life in contemporary society (Whitehead, 1929, p. 13). Jamie Cohen-Cole (2014, p. 21) has noted Whitehead’s influence among members of the Harvard Committee on Education in a Free Society after World War II.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicholas M. Strohl

Nicholas M. Strohl is a College Counselor based in Madison, WI. He completed a Ph.D. in history and educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2018 and has taught as a lecturer in history and educational policy studies at Marquette University and UW-Madison. His research explores the deep roots of the Truman Commission’s recommendations in the first half of the 20th century and how its internal debates and disagreements foreshadowed the complicated and challenging politics of federal higher education policy after World War II.

Ethan W. Ris

Ethan W. Ris is an Associate Professor of Higher Education Administration at the University of Nevada, Reno. His research is on postsecondary policy and reform in the United States over the course of the 20th century. He is the author of Other People’s Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2022), and has held research fellowships with the National Endowment for the Humanities, Spencer Foundation/National Academy of Education, and the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.