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Abstract
The birth of formal citizenship education in the United States emerged in the context of mass immigration, the Progressive Movement, and the First World War. Wartime citizenship education has been chastised for its emphasis on patriotism and loyalty, and while this is a trend, historians have minimised the ways in which the democratic goals of the Progressive Movement at large also shaped citizenship education in its infancy. The paper situates citizenship education within the larger and broader aims of the Progressive Movement, and then looks at two federal agencies, the Bureau of Education and the Bureau of Naturalization, which produced and distributed the first citizenship curricula to the nation’s teachers. Ultimately, analysis of their citizenship textbook and teachers’ manual show that, even during war, it was assumed that through education any person, regardless of nationality or gender, could access citizenship, this being a very democratic mission in a paranoid moment.
Notes
1 Roosevelt’s public essays that popularised war preparedness and inspired organisations such as the National Security League, American Defense Society, League to Enforce Peace, and the American Rights Committee, were published as, Roosevelt, America and the World War (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915); Theodore Roosevelt, America and the World War, 3rd ed. (New York: George H. Doran, 1916).
2 Arthur Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910–1917 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954); Robert H. Zieger, America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); Michael Pearlman, To Make Democracy Safe for America: Patricians and Preparedness in the Progressive Era (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984).
3 A note on capitalisation: Progressive is used to identify the specific movement that grew along with the Progressive Party, in the period roughly from 1890 to 1920. On Wilson’s view: The sinking of the Lusitania in May of 1915 convinced the President that military expansion through the 1916 National Defense Act was as essential as Americanisation programmes for immigrants.
4 On ‘ethnic nationalists’ see Jeffrey Mirel, Patriotic Pluralism: Americanization Education and European Immigrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), Chapter One; during the First World War 30,000 German nationals, many longstanding residents of the United Kingdom, were interned in the UK; see Richard Dove, ed., ‘Totally Un-English’? Britain’s Internment of ‘Enemy Aliens’ in Two World Wars, Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, Vol. 7 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 11.
5 In the United States, President Wilson’s policies required the registration of over 250,000 of German descent. Over 6000 aliens were arrested during the war and pardoned in 1919, yet there was no official state internment policy as there would be later in the Second World War.
6 For a useful overview of Progressive era historiography see, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, ed., Who Were the Progressives? (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002).
7 William J. Reese, Power and the Promise of School Reform: Grassroots Movements during the Progressive Era (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002), 2.
8 Mirel, 95–6; John F. McClymer, ‘The Federal Government and the Americanization Movement, 1915–1924’, in George E. Pozzetta, Americanization, Social Control, and Philanthropy (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991).
9 This article supports a more recent turn in Progressive Era historiography to resurrect the lost democratic impulses of the period; for a discussion of this historiography see Robert Johnston, ‘Re-democratizing the Progressive Era: The Politics of Progressive Era Political Historiography’, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1, no.1 (January 2002): 68–92.
10 Mattson, 114.
11 Kevin Mattson, Creating a Democratic Public: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy During the Progressive Era (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 110, 125; Steven L. Piott, Daily Life in the Progressive Era (Oxford: Greenwood Press, 2011). Rebecca Edwards finds the origins of Progressivism in the 1860s in her book, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865–1905 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), and others like Arthur S. Link, ‘What Happened to the Progressive Movement in the 1920s?’, American Historical Review 64, no. 4 (July 1959), 833–851; and more recently Maureen Flanagan traces the movement into the 1920s in her book, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
12 John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns in American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1965); Gary Gerstle, ‘Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans’, Journal of American History 84, no. 2 (September 1997): 524–58.
13 Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), 74; Edward G. Hartmann, The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant (New York: Columbia University Press 1948), 105.
14 Robert H. Zieger, America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); Robert H. Weibe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1966); David Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).
15 Zieger, 203; Heinz Eulau, ‘Wilsonian Idealist: Walter Lippmann Goes to War’, Antioch Review 14, no. 1 (Spring 1954): 87–108, 87.
16 Walter Lippmann, ‘The Defense of the Atlantic World’, in Force and Ideas: The Early Writings, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2000), 75.
17 John Dewey’s ‘Conscience and Compulsion’, ‘The Future of Pacifism’, ‘What America Will Fight For’, and ‘Conscription of Thought’ were published in The New Republic on July 14, July 28, August 18, and September 1, 1917, respectively; Randolph Bourne, ‘Twilight of Idol’s, The Seven Arts 11 (Oct. 1917): 688–702; the Dewey–Bourne break is discussed in Alan Cywar, ‘John Dewey in World War I: Patriotism and International Progressivism’, American Quarterly 21, no. 3 (Autumn, 1969): 578–94.
18 Mattson, 11.
19 Chicago Association of Commerce, A Guide to the City of Chicago (Chicago: Chicago Association of Commerce, 1909), 26.
20 The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 ended racial restrictions on citizenship, as established in the 1790 Naturalization Act, but retained the quota system for nationalities.
21 The 1922 Cable Act afforded women an independent citizenship status, only to be repealed in 1936.
22 Black and indigenous Americans have distinct and complex histories of citizenship, and thus while I recognise here that both groups possessed limited access to full citizenship, this article does not take up these important topics.
23 This multivolume study of immigrants by the United States Immigration Commission was often referred to by the name of the senator who instigated the study, William Dillingham of Vermont.
24 Brief Statement of the Investigations of the Immigration Commission, With Conclusions and Recommendations and Views of the Minority 1, US Immigration Commission (Washington, DC: GPO, 1911), digitised by Stanford University, http://site.ebrary.com/lib/stanfordimmigrationdillingham/EDF?id=10006604&jsenabled=yes, (accessed February, 1 2013), 23.
25 Brief Statement of the Investigations of the Immigration Commission, 44. Here they are most likely referring to Boas’s 1912 article, ‘Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants’, in American Anthropologist 14, no. 3 (Jul–Sep): 530–562; Israel Zangwill, The Melting-Pot (New York: Macmillan, 1909).
26 Ibid.
27 Theodore Roosevelt, Fear God and Take Your Own Part (Whitfish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2003), originally published in 1916, 362.
28 Roosevelt, Fear God, 362.
29 As part of the War Department from 1865, the Freedman’s Bureau, formally the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, organised and established schools for newly freed blacks and created a textbook for distribution in black schools. This brief experiment by the federal government in education ceased operations in 1872. See David Tyack and Robert Lowe, ‘The Constitutional Moment: Reconstruction and Black Education in the South’, American Journal of Education 94, no. 2 (February, 1986), 236–56.
30 Frances Kellor, Immigration and the Future (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1920), 149.
31 Rivka Shpak Lissak, Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
32 Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 144.
33 Ibid., 136.
34 Ibid., 146.
35 Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (London: Harper & Brothers, 1911) positioned him as a popular and intellectual leader of the efficiency movement.
36 Cremin, 74.
37 Hartmann, 46, citing the North American Civic League for Immigrants, Annual Report 1909–10, 20–1.
38 Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Propaganda in the U.S. and Australia, ed. Andrew Lohrey, (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1995), 46.
39 Carey, 44–5; Hartmann, 97, citing the CIA’s publication, Memorandum to the Advisory Commission of the Council of National Defense Concerning the Committee for Immigrants in America, National Americanization Committee, and Affiliated Organizations, October 12, 1917, 5.
40 Robert A. Carlson, The Americanization Syndrome: A Quest for Conformity (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 82; Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Propaganda in the U.S. and Australia, ed. Andrew Lohrey (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1995), 41; Hartmann, 38, 88.
41 On Kellor see Fitzpatrick, 159–160 and Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 91–117. On donors to Kellor’s initiative see Frances Kellor to Commissioner Claxton, April 25, 1918, in National Archives, Record Group 12 Records of the Office of Education, Records of the Commisioner of Education, Historical Files, 1870–1950, File 106, Entry 6, Box 7. Felix Wartburg and George Trumbull.
42 Fitzpatrick, 160.
43 One recent work argues that Kellor was also an advocate for participatory citizenship, and although I see her as a corporate progressive I recognise her interest in expanding access to citizenship. See John Press, ‘Frances Kellor, Americanization, and the Quest for Participatory Democracy’ (Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, 2010).
44 Jeremiah W. Jenks, ‘The Making of Citizens’, in Citizenship and the Schools (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1906), 77.
45 Department of Education, Chicago, Illinois, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Schools for the Year Ending June 30, 1926, 128–9.
46 Carey, 45.
47 Ibid.
48 Hartmann, 103.
49 Mirel; Thomas Winter, Making Men, Making Class: The YMCA and Workingmen, 1877–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Paul McBride, ‘Peter Roberts and the YMCA Americanization Program 1907–World War I’, Pennsylvania History 44, no. 2 (April 1977): 145–62; and for a great example of a settlement house class see the work of Mary McDowell’s Citizenship Class in her papers (Box 2, Folder 11) at the Chicago History Museum Research Center, Chicago, Illinois.
50 Gayle Gullet, ‘Women Progressives and the Politics of Americanization in California, 1915–1920’, Pacific Historical Review 64 (February 1995): 89–90.
51 In Chicago, as was typical, over 75% of immigrant aliens enrolled in citizenship classes were less than 30 years old. Public Schools of the City of Chicago, Sixty-Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Education, for the year ending June 30, 1918, 217.
52 Higham, 213.
53 Memorandum by Crist to Campbell, January 12, 1916, NARA RG85, 27671/789.
54 Raymond F. Crist, An Outline Course in Citizenship (Washington, DC: GPO, 1916), 3–7.
55 Ibid., 7.
56 Ibid., 17–21.
57 Ibid.,16.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., 9.
61 Ibid., 17–21.
62 Ibid., 18.
63 Raymond F. Crist, Deputy Commissioner of Naturalization, Proceedings of the First Citizenship Convention, Bureau of Naturalization, Washington, DC, July 10–15, 1916 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1917), 34.
64 Raymond F. Crist, Student’s Textbook (Washington, DC: GPO, 1918).
65 Crist, Student’s Textbook, 2; in 1919 a committee of 12 educators began revising the 1918 Student’s Textbook based on submitted feedback. Adam Goodman, ‘Defining and Inculcating “The Soul of America”: The Bureau of Naturalization and the Americanization Movement, 1914–1919’, DCC Workshop Draft, University of Pennsylvania, unpublished paper, November 2009, available online at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/dcc/workshops/documents/Goodman_DCC09.pdf (accessed February 9, 2013), 24.
66 Mabel Hill, The Teaching of Civics (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 7–8.
67 Bessie Louis Peirce, Public Opinion and the Teaching of History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), 71.
68 Crist, Proceedings of the First Citizenship Convention, 41.
69 Grace Abbott, ‘Introduction’, in The Educational Needs of Immigrants in Illinois (Springfield: State of Illinois Department of Registration and Education), 1920.
70 Jane Addams, ‘Twenty Years at Hull-House’, in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, ed. Nina Baym (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 702.
71 Dewey, quoted in Robert A. Carlson, ‘Americanization as an Adult Education Movement’, History of Education Quarterly 10, no. 4 (Winter 1970): 454.
72 Crist, Student’s Textbook, 23.
73 Ibid., 23–9.
74 Raymond F. Crist, Teacher’s Manual (Washington, DC: GPO, 1918), 13.
75 Ibid., 22.
76 Ibid., 5.
77 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Naturalization to the Secretary of Labor, US Department of Labor, Bureau of Naturalization, 1920, 78.
78 For discussions of how employers threatened removal, withheld promotions and paid lower wages to non-citizens who did not attend the factory’s classes, 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 (1992): 996–1020; Stephen Meyer, ‘Adapting the Immigrant to the Line: Americanization in the Ford Factory, 1914–1921’, Journal of Social History 14 (1980): 67–82.
79 Hartmann, 103.
80 Jack Schneider, ‘Memory Test: A History of U.S. Citizenship Education and Examination’, Teachers College Record 112, no. 9 (2010), 2379–2404, citing US Department of Labor, Bureau of Naturalization, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Naturalization (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916), 10.
81 The literacy requirement was only part of a prohibitive immigration act known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act. Prospective immigrants over the age of 16 were prohibited from entering the US if they could not read 30–40 words in any language.
82 Crist, An Outline Course in Citizenship, 4.
83 Based on the description in A Year of Americanization Work, July 1918–July 1919, described in Douglas Bukowski, Big Bill Thompson, Chicago, and the Politics of Image (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 107–8.
84 Crist, An Outline Course in Citizenship, 5.
85 Crist, Teacher’s Manual, 20.
86 Ibid., 5.
87 Ibid., 6.
88 Ibid., 6.
89 Ibid., 27–8.
90 Peirce, 77–81.
91 Peirce, 82.
92 Mirel, 57.
93 Goodman, ‘Defining and Inculcating “The Soul of America”’.