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Building a New Educational State
Foundations, Schools, and the American South
By Joan Malczewski The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-39476-3
CHAPTER 1
"The Thrill of This State-Building Work"
When the Confederate Congress met in 1862, Jabez Lafayette Monroe Curry seemed an obvious choice to represent Alabama. He was a member of the Democratic Party and a southern aristocrat, educated on a large plantation with private tutors and then at the University of Georgia and Harvard Law School. He served in the Alabama Congress from 1847 to 1856 and was a representative to the US Congress from 1857 to 1862. He was also a Baptist minister with a gift for public speaking. In an 1859 address to the House of Representatives on the eve of the Civil War, Curry seemed the perfect spokesman for his southern colleagues. "In all possible modes of government there will be a conflict between sections and interests and classes ... every separate community must be able to protect itself [and] ... this power of self-protection, according to my judgment and my theory of politics, resides in each State." Although Curry was adamant enough about his views to serve in the Confederate Army, he spent the four decades following the Civil War promoting public, universal education in the South that was "organized, controlled, and liberally supported by the State" but national in scope and developed outside the boundaries of Alabama. He not only advocated universal education but also encouraged the federal government to give aid to southern schools. As a general agent to the Peabody Fund beginning in 1881, and a trustee of the Slater Fund, he was instrumental to the development of the Conference for Education in the South, the Southern Education Board (SEB), and the General Education Board (GEB). Curry's participation in these endeavors illustrates that southern education reform, as promoted by northern foundations, was a collaborative process, developed in partnership with southern reformers, and implemented in partnership with southern states. His interest in promoting universal education for both races seems inconsistent with his earlier views, alluding to the possibility that he believed education reform might achieve something beyond simple learning.
Curry's role was particularly important to southern education reform. He influenced an agenda that would be more acceptable to southerners, helped northerners to manage the southern sociopolitical culture, fostered cooperation between the North and the South, and brought the legitimacy that foundations needed in their campaign for universal education. The influence of an ex-Confederate like Curry and, indeed, the willingness of foundations to rely so heavily on him, provides evidence that foundations neglected to use the power of their largesse to overturn the South's unjust, racial state. They focused instead on their belief that public schooling was essential to southern development. The philanthropists brought a paternalistic perspective to southern education reform. They hoped to save not just the South but also the nation. Indeed, when the president of the Fifth Conference for Education in the South made his address to the assembly, he was clear about the import of the work: "As one of our number so often remarks, we must come to these people that they may have life and have it more abundantly. Truly this work is Christ-like." Their messianic aspirations included supreme faith in the expertise and organizational skills that they brought to the task.
Southern education reform was indeed a scientific business. William Baldwin, head of the Long Island Railroad and first chair of the GEB, called for the application of business methods to reform and the elimination of references to past differences between the North and South. Indeed, an effective business model required a new era of post–Civil War collaboration between northern and southern reformers. The Conference for Education in the South, which began in 1898 at Capon Springs, West Virginia, brought together an assembly of southern citizens who were leaders in farming, business, church, and school, but quickly became an important venue for far-reaching collaboration between reformers, university scholars, northern businessmen, and southerners who represented state interests. Edwin Alderman, a prominent reformer who served as president of three southern universities and a member of the SEB, spoke to the importance of cooperation in his presentation to reformers at the 1902 conference. "I believe that this assembly is the largest event in the direction of national American unity which occurred in this generation."
Alderman's comments reflected both an interest in the kind of associated action that defined policy making at the federal level at this time and also reformers' hopes that education reform might promote a stronger state and overcome problems of southern development and separateness. Failed Reconstruction policies created a separatist attitude in a South that remained wary of northern influence, including that of the federal government, and resentful that southern life might be reconstituted in service of northern political and economic goals. However, southern education reform was a popular cause among disparate groups of white donors and reformers long before the first annual conference. Their ideas converged in a shared belief that education was central to building a more powerful American state, aspirations that required the rehabilitation and uplift of the South, and national unity. Curry spoke to members of the annual conference in 1899 about the commitment to those national ideals. "Our country is the glory of earth, the hope of the oppressed of all lands, the realization of the dignity of man as man, the fulfillment of the dreams of all who have built their hopes on human capabilities and human liberty, and nothing can surpass the duty to omit no exertion of transmitting unimpaired all these blessings and hopes to those who are to come after us." He promoted support for every education agency from kindergarten through the university in pursuit of these ideals, serving all citizens both black and white. However, he was explicit about the need to educate whites first. "The white people are to be the leaders, to take the initiative, to have the directive control in all matters pertaining to civilization and the highest interests of our beloved land. History demonstrates that the Caucasian will rule. He ought to rule. ... This white supremacy does not mean hostility to the negro, but friendship for him." Education reformers sought to expand public schooling without imposing ideals that challenged these beliefs in rural regions of the South. Yet, education reform did challenge southerners to think differently about the purposes of schooling and its relationship to the state.
In general, foundation reformers wanted government that was effective, efficient, and would provide an appropriate venue for disseminating policy. However, while efforts to increase participation in schooling might seem at first glance to be motivated by democratic concerns that promoted civic participation, this was not the case. Foundations required local participation for program efficacy but ultimately believed that foundation ideas based in scientific knowledge and expertise would be superior to local ideas. Indeed a conference resolution called on members to promote "free education of such efficiency as shall make the coming generation of citizens of the Southern States the best trained men and women that an enlightened democracy can produce. To this end it urges the increase of taxes for school use, the lengthening of school terms, the better payment of teachers as fast as prudent regard for the economic conditions of every community will permit." These initiatives required the administrative capacity that might be achieved through state education standards and accountability, as well as mechanisms that connected small rural communities to the state. An effective public system of education required governance structures that had the capacity to provide sufficient oversight, integrate a range of state and local agencies, and promote the organization and participation of local communities. Foundation programs often resulted in parallel governance systems used to establish new policy, enact reform, and ensure bureaucratic management over social policy in the South. Their programs encompassed an array of initiatives aimed at state formation. The development of bureaucracy and standardization, to the extent that states were willing to undertake it, would likely lead over time to greater centralization at the level of individual states. For states that did not develop such bureaucracy, foundation programs that promoted community organizing and imposed standards through alternative systems of governance might promote administrative hierarchies and capacity. As later examples illustrate, foundations often awarded funds on the condition that local schools standardized practice, including Rosenwald gifts for school construction that required minimum teacher salaries and school terms.
School reformers across the nation in the early twentieth century worked to transform the public school as a governing institution. This was also true in the South, where foundations conceived of a public system of education that would promote national ideals through decentralized and local systems of public education. But southern school reform proved far more complicated. The region lacked administrative capacity, was defined by white supremacy and perceived as holding the nation back from greatness. In most southern communities, nearly all power resided at the county level in governance units much smaller than their northern counterparts and led primarily by elected and part-time officials. Southern whites perceived this type of governance structure conducive to promoting their narrow interests; they mistrusted centralization that might extract resources for expanded governance capacity and diminish local control. Foundation officials were concerned about such forms of governance and hoped to design programs that promoted a public system of education and enhanced governance capacity at the level of both individual states and localities. Success depended upon men like Curry, who could facilitate connections between northern and southern reformers, southern political systems, and participants at the state and local level across the South.
Ultimately, foundation programs had the potential to strengthen both governance capacity and black agency. However, local programs limited the educational attainment of rural black citizens whose aspirations were impacted by the foundations' infatuation with industrial education. One way to keep white southern politicians involved was to provide some guarantee that rural black education would not upset the racial state. However, this does not mean that northern reformers and philanthropists promoted industrial education in a merely instrumentalist fashion, or had an alternative, more liberal conception of black education that was compromised through collaboration. As one reformer said, "Negro education is recognized as a part of the public education system in every state, both South and North. The education of every child in our country is an admitted national duty." This reflects simultaneously a commitment to black education and an indication that some reformers grudgingly promoted it only because both the law and perhaps conscience required it. At least in the short term, northern philanthropists and reformers were comfortable with an unequal system of universal education. Ultimately, foundation programs extended black educational opportunity into rural communities, yet restricted the quality of education that would be available to rural black citizens. Yet, their programs also strengthened local governance capacity through schooling and affected black agency over the longer term.
The Conference on Southern Education and Cooperation for Southern Reform
Dr. Hollis Frissell, principal of the Hampton Institute, helped to organize the first Conference for Education in the South in 1898 and delivered the opening address, advocating an industrial-education curriculum that would become a central feature of education reform in rural black communities. However, Reverend A. B. Hunter, who was elected secretary and treasurer of the conference, delivered a paper that was even more instructive. "If our work lies outside the jurisdiction of the national government; we ought to constitute a republic or confederacy among ourselves." Frissell, like many participants, agreed with Hunter. "It became clear in 1898, at this first Capon Springs Conference, that to accomplish the greatest good in the Southern education field the North and South must enter into closer relations ... since the Federal Government had given the South practically no assistance, the North should help in a fraternal sprit, not to meddle or interfere, but to 'stand by' as fellow-citizens of a common country." At its inception, the conference was an important site to promote cooperation, especially in the absence of explicit and strong government participation at the national or state level, and that cooperation determined the agenda that would develop.
This is not meant to minimize the importance of Frissell's opening address. Industrial education, a curriculum intended to train rural blacks for agricultural and domestic labor in the South, became a defining feature of foundation support, and its limitations were clear. It promoted the idea that hard labor was a principle of civilized life. Samuel Chapman Armstrong established the Hampton Institute in 1867 to promote education for the freed blacks. Booker T. Washington, a graduate of the Hampton Institute, was chosen to be the founding principal of the Tuskegee Institute. Both institutions promoted a strict industrial-training curriculum that sought to cultivate black citizens who would dignify labor and contribute to the South's prosperity.
The work in these two institutions heavily influenced the philanthropists and their associates. Robert Curtis Ogden, head of the New York branch of Philadelphia's Wanamaker Stores, was appointed vice president of the second Conference for Education in the South, and then president of the SEB and the GEB. Ogden had helped to establish the Hampton Institute in 1867 and served as a trustee for both Hampton and Tuskegee. He organized railroad tours of southern communities in conjunction with the annual conferences to generate greater participation from potential northern donors. The events highlighted for many the rural nature of the South and its lack of both community centers and an administrative infrastructure to deliver public education. George Foster Peabody and William Baldwin also served as trustees at both institutions. They found it easy to make the case that economic prosperity depended upon an educated black labor force, and industrial education could achieve it.
An address by William Baldwin at the first conference clarified that southern education reform was not designed to challenge the Jim Crow order. "Social recognition of the negro by the white is a simple impossibility, and is entirely dismissed from the minds of the white, and by the intelligent Negroes. ... Properly directed he is the best possible laborer to meet the climatic conditions of the South." Baldwin's statement reflected both racial attitudes and national trends that made it easier for philanthropists and reformers to become enamored of industrial education. The needs of a modern yet racialized industrial "democracy" influenced education reformers in the late nineteenth century, who became more interested in the practical applications of knowledge and developed manual-training programs in the emerging high schools. Educators advocated its benefits, recognizing the industrial need for trained workers. In combination with literacy, science, and math, reformers believed manual training could aid in the selection of occupations, "cultivate the mechanical and scientific imagination ... and, increase the breadwinning and home-making power of the average boy." Francis Parker, an early proponent of progressive education, developed ideas about manual training when he served as superintendent of schools in Quincy, Massachusetts, beginning in 1875. "Out of real work, the child develops a motive that directs his life work. Doing work thoroughly has a great moral influence." The country life movement at the end of the century extended these ideas to rural life by promoting agricultural-training programs that led to vocational-education legislation beginning with the Smith-Lever Act in 1914.
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Excerpted from Building a New Educational State by Joan Malczewski. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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