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Abstract
After the Civil War (1861–1865), the United States faced a problem of “reconstruction” similar to that confronted by other nations at the time and familiar to the US since at least the Mexican–American War (1846–1848). The problem was one of territorial and political (re)integration: how to take territories that had only recently been operating under “foreign” governance and integrate them into an expanded nation-state on common structural terms. This paper considers the significance of education in that process of state (re)formation after the Civil War, with particular attention to its role in federal territories of the US West. Specifically, this paper analyses the role that education-based restrictions on citizenship, voting rights and office-holding played in constructing formal state power in the cases of five western territories: Hawaii, Indian Territory, Oklahoma, Arizona and New Mexico. A focus on the significance of education in these cases both advances and challenges literature on the “hidden” and decentralised structure of national policy-making in the US. It adds to that literature by illuminating how education served as an indirect tool of national policy in the West, effectively shaping the structure of power in other policy domains. At the same time, by focusing on the US West, the present analysis challenges the idea that national governance in the US was particularly “decentralised” or “hidden”. It highlights instead: (1) the role of colonial racialism in shaping national responsibility and authority for education in the US; and (2) the significance of education as both an alternative and a corollary to war in establishing US colonial power.
Notes
1 The reference here is to Brian Balogh’s concept of a “government out of sight” but also more broadly to a literature on “weak” and “strong”, centralised and decentralised government in the US. See Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: the Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and items in notes 8 and 9 below.
2 I refer here to the large literature still known in US historiography as “the New Western History”, though that literature is now 30 years old. For an excellent historiographical overview of the central claims and ideas of this literature, see John Wunder’s two-part article, What’s Old about the New Western History: Race and Gender, Part I,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 85, no. 2 (April, 1994): 50–58; and “Part 2: Environment and Economy,” ibid. 89, no. 2 (Spring, 1998): 84–96.
The present essay draws on commonly accepted central claims of this literature as represented in the following leading scholarly works: Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987); Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1991); and William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994). On broader connections between history of the US West and US imperialism, see Paul Sabin, “Home and Abroad: The Two ‘Wests’ of Twentieth Century United States History,” Pacific Historical Review 66, no. 3 (August, 1997): 305–35; and Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States and the World,” American Historical Review 116:5 (December 2011): 1348–1391.
3 On literacy qualifications for suffrage in the in the Jim Crow South see Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 148–72. Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New Yokr: Vintage, 2005); W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward the History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935). On the consequences of such restrictions for black education, see Robert Margo, Race and Schooling in the South, 1880–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990; James Anderson, Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Horace Mann Bond, The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1934).
4 Claims and analysis in this paper are based on a larger study, Nancy Beadie, "Paramount Duty of the State: Education and State Formation in Comparative Historical Perspective, 1776-1912," (unpublished). Other papers from this project include: Nancy Beadie, “Assessing the Consequences of Failure: The Uses of History in Education Policy and Decision-Making,” in Philosophy and History of the Discipline of Education, ed. Paul Smeyers and Marc Depaepe (Leuven, Belgium: Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Leuven, 2013); Nancy Beadie, “The Federal Role in Education and the Rise of Social Science Research: Historical and Comparative Perspectives,” Review of Research in Education 40 (2016), forthcoming; Nancy Beadie, “The Rise of National Educational Systems: North America,” in Oxford Handbook of the History of Education, ed. John L. Rury and Eileen H. Tamura (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
5 Peter Lindert, Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth since the 18th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
6 See G. Antonio Espinoza, Education and the State in Modern Peru: Primary Schooling in Lima, 1821–1921 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Mary Kay Vaughn, The State, Education, and Social Class in Mexico, 1880–1928 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1982); Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); Stephen E. Lewis, The Ambivalent Revolution: Forging State and Nation in Chiapas, 1910–1945 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005); Andrae Marak, From Many, One: Indians, Peasants, Borders, and Education in Callista Mexico, 1924–1935 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2009); Ruben Flores, Backroad Pragmatists: Mexico’s Melting Pot and Civil Rights in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2014).
7 For an extended discussion of this earlier period of US educational development in comparative perspective see Nancy Beadie, “Education, Social Capital and State Formation in Comparative Historical Perspective: Preliminary Investigations,” Paedagogica Historica 46, nos 1–2 (April 2010): 15–32.
8 Balogh, A Government Out of Sight. Other key texts in this tradition include William J. Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113 (June 2008): 752–72; Peter Baldwin, “Beyond Weak and Strong: Rethinking the State in Comparative Policy History,” Journal of Policy History 17 (2005): 12–33; Elisabeth Clemens, The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, the Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Amy Bridges, “Managing the Periphery in the Gilded Age: Writing Constitutions for the Western States,” Studies in American Political Development 22 (Spring 2008): 32–68.
9 Tracy L. Steffes, School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
10 This summary is based on an analysis of the education provisions in all US state constitutions, constitutional revisions, organic acts and other documents establishing civil government in territories and states for the period from 1776 to 1912.
11 Exceptions are the Texas constitution of 1845 and the Louisiana constitution of 1845, which included provisions establishing state-supported systems of free common schools.
12 The exception was Tennessee, which had been readmitted to Congress under President Johnson and before the Congressional Reconstruction Act of 1867. Tennessee had thus not been forced to accept requirements imposed on the other secessionist states.
13 Gordon Can field Lee, The Struggle for Federal Aid, First Phase: A History of the Attempts to Obtain Federal Aid for the Common Schools, 1870–1890 (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1949).
14 Other treatments of aspects of this national education campaign include: Lee, The Struggle for Federal Aid; Ward M. McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction: The Public School in the Politics of the 1870s (Albany: State University of New York, 1998); Williamjames Hull Hoffer, To Enlarge the Machinery of Government: Congressional Debates and the Growth of the American State, 1858–1891 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 89–143; Henry W. Blair, National Aid in the Establishment and Temporary Support of Common Schools: The Education Bill (Washington, DC: Government Publications, 1887).
15 For an extended discussion of arguments mobilised in support of the Bill, see Beadie, “The Federal Role in Education.”
16 Blair, National Aid, 11, column I.
17 Ibid., 11, column II.
18 Ibid., 7, column II to p. 8.
19 “Text of the Bill S. 194 as it passed the Senate, March 5, 1886,” Section 11, reprinted as part of Blair, National Aid (1887), 49. Previous versions of the Bill, including the version that passed in 1884, had the same provisions as are discussed here but under different section numbers.
20 Ibid., Section 6.
21 Ibid., Section 7.
22 James Anderson, Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 1995).
23 “Civil Government in Alaska – 1884,” Section 12, reprinted in Francis Newton Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Organic Laws, Vol. I, 242 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1909). This bill was accepted by Congress on 17 May 1884, just a month after the Blair Bill had first successfully passed the Senate.
24 Ibid., Section 13, Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Organic Laws, Volume I, 242.
25 Blair, National Aid, 6, column II.
26 Other cases are considered in the larger project of which this paper is a part. See note 4.
27 James B. Anderson, “Race-Conscious Educational Policies.”
28 For extended discussion of this colonial incursion see: Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo’ole Osorio, Disemembering Lahui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2002).
29 This timeline extends from the 1834 Indian Intercourse Act which first defined the terms upon which trade with tribes in Indian Territory should be governed, through the post-Civil War “re-negotiation” of treaties in 1866 which forced the Five Civilized Tribes to sell “surplus” land to the Federal Government, to the 1889 opening of surplus lands to non-Native settlement, the 1890 organisation of those lands as the Territory of Oklahoma, and the 1898 Curtis Act, which imposed the Dawes allotment policy on the Five Civilized Tribes and remaining Indian Territory. See Wickett cited below.
30 Murray R. Wickett, Contested Territory: Whites, Native Americans and African Americans in Oklahoma, 1865–1907 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2000). Also, David A. Chang, Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832–1929 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2010); Bonnie Lynn-Sherow, Red Earth: Race and Agriculture in Oklahoma Territory (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004) and Jeffrey Burton, Indian Territory and the United States, 1866–1906 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995).
31 “Territorial Government of Oklahoma – 1890, An Act to provide a temporary government for the Territory of Oklahoma, to enlarge the jurisdiction of the United States Court in the Indian Territory, and for other purposes,” reprinted in Thorpe ed., Federal and State Constitutions, Vol. 5, 2942.
32 “Territorial Government of Hawaii – 1900,” Section 60 (Qualifications of Voters for Representatives), reprinted in Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions, Vol. 2, 893.
33 “Constitution of the Hawaiian Islands, Signed by His Majesty Kalakaua, July 6, and Promulgated July 7, 1887,” Article 59, Section Three (Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette Publishing Company, 1887) reprinted in Ka Ho’oilina: Journal of Hawaiian Language Sources (2004): 23–73.
34 “Territorial Government of Hawaii – 1900,” Section 60 (Qualifications of Voters for Representatives), reprinted in Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions, Vol. 2, 893.
35 “Constitution of the Hawaiian Islands, 1887,” Ka Ho’oilina ; this particular section appears on pp. 49–51 of that reprint.
36 See Osorio, Dismembering; also, Julie Kaomea, “Education for Elimination in Nineteenth-Century Hawai’i: Settler Colonialism and the Native Hawaiian Chiefs’ Children’s Boarding School,” History of Education Quarterly 54 (May 2014): 123–44; Michelle Morgan, “Americanizing the Teachers: Identity, Citizenship, and the Teaching Corps in Hawai’I, 1900–1941,” Western Historical Quarterly 45 (Summer 2014): 147–67.
37 Osorio, Dismembering, passim.
38 This point is documented and discussed extensively in Linda C. Noel, “‘I am an American:’ Anglos, Mexicans, Nativos, and the National Debate over Arizona and New Mexico Statehood,” Pacific Historical Review 80, no. 3 (2011): 430–67. See also Howard Lamar, The Far Southwest, 1846–1912: A Territorial History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966).
39 “Enabling Act for Oklahoma – 1906,” Section 25, Part 5, reprinted in Thorpe ed., The Federal and State Constitutions, Vol. 5, 2975.
40 The 1912 state constitution for New Mexico (as contrasted with the state constitution for Arizona) included a number of bilingual provisions. For example, it required that laws be printed in both Spanish and English. See Linda C. Noel, “‘I am an American’” and her book Debating American Identity: Southwestern Statehood and Mexican Immigration (Tucson: University Press of Arizona, 2014).
41 For an incisive account of historical connections between the policies described in the present paper and US colonial policy in Cuba and Puerto Rico, see Sarah Manekin, “Spreading the Empire of Free Education, 1865–1905” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2009).
42 Namely, Brazil in 1881 and Peru in 1896 adopted literacy restrictions on suffrage. I am grateful to Antonio Espinoza for pointing out these parallel developments and directing me to relevant secondary literature. See Hilda Sabato, “On Political Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century Latin America,” American Historical Review 106, no. 4 (October, 2001): 1290–1315. On literacy and suffrage see Marcel Caruso, “Literacy and Suffrage: The Politicization of Schooling in Postcolonial Hispanic America (1810–1850),” Paedagogica Historica 46, no. 4 (August 2010): 463–78.