[Originally from Joseph R. Peden and Fred R. Glahe, eds., The American Family and the State (San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute, 1986).]
Whereas the “Progressive Period” was once narrowly designated because the interval 1900–1914, historians now understand that the interval is basically a lot broader, stretching from the latter many years of the nineteenth century into the early Nineteen Twenties. The broader interval marks an period during which your complete American polity—from economics to city planning to drugs to social work to the licensing of professions to the ideology of intellectuals—was reworked from a roughly laissez-faire system primarily based on particular person rights to one in every of state planning and management. Within the sphere of public coverage points intently associated to the lifetime of the household, many of the change occurred, or a minimum of started, within the latter many years of the nineteenth century. On this paper we will use the analytic insights of the “new political historical past” to look at the methods during which the so-called progressives sought to form and management chosen features of American household life.
ETHNORELIGIOUS CONFLICT AND THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Within the final twenty years, the arrival of the “new political historical past” has reworked our understanding of the political occasion system and the premise of political battle in nineteenth century America. In distinction to the occasion methods of the 20th century (the “fourth” occasion system, 1896–1932, of Republican supremacy; the “fifth” occasion system, 1932–? of Democratic supremacy), the nineteenth century political events weren’t bland coalitions of pursuits with just about the identical amorphous ideology, with every occasion blurring what’s left of its picture throughout campaigns to enchantment to the big impartial middle. Within the nineteenth century, every occasion supplied a fiercely contrasting ideology, and political events carried out the perform of imposing a typical ideology on various sectional and financial pursuits. Throughout campaigns, the ideology and the partisanship grew to become fiercer and much more clearly demarcated, because the object was to not enchantment to impartial moderates—there have been just about none—however to deliver out the vote of 1’s personal partisans. Such partisanship and sharp alternate options marked the “second” American occasion system (Whig versus Democrat, roughly 1830 to the mid-1850s) and the “third” occasion system (intently fought Republican versus Democrat, mid-1850s to 1896).
One other essential perception of the brand new political historical past is that the partisan ardour devoted by rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans to nationwide financial points, stemmed from an analogous ardour devoted on the native and state degree to what would now be known as “social” points. Moreover, that political battle, from the 1830s on, stemmed from a radical transformation that occurred in American Protestantism on account of the revival motion of the 1830s.
The brand new revival motion swept the Protestant church buildings, notably within the North, like wildfire. In distinction to the previous creedal Calvinist church buildings that careworn the significance of obeying God’s regulation as expressed within the church creed, the brand new “pietism” was very totally different. The pietist doctrine was basically as follows: Particular creeds of assorted church buildings or sects don’t matter. Neither does obedience to the rituals or liturgies of the actual church. What counts for salvation is simply every particular person being “born once more”—a direct confrontation between the person and God, a mystical and emotional conversion during which the person achieves salvation. The ceremony of baptism, to the pietist, subsequently turns into secondary; of main significance is his or her private second of conversion.
But when the precise church or creed turns into submerged in a obscure Christian interdenominationalism, then the person Christian is left on his personal to grapple with the issues of salvation. Pietism, because it swept American Protestantism within the 1830s, took two very totally different varieties in North and South, with very totally different political implications. The Southerners, a minimum of till the Nineties, grew to become “salvationist pietists,” that’s, they believed that the emotional expertise of particular person regeneration, of being born once more, was sufficient to make sure salvation. Faith was a separate compartment of life, a vertical individual-God relation carrying no crucial to rework man-made tradition and interhuman relations.
In distinction, the Northerners, notably within the areas inhabited by “Yankees,” adopted a far totally different type of pietism, “evangelical pietism.” The evangelical pietists believed that man might obtain salvation by an act of free will. Extra notably, in addition they believed that it was essential to an individual’s personal salvation—and never simply a good suggestion—to attempt his greatest to make sure the salvation of everybody else in society:
“To unfold holiness,” to create that Christian commonwealth by bringing all males to Christ, was the divinely ordered obligation of the “saved.” Their mandate was “to rework the world into the picture of Christ.”
Since every particular person is alone to wrestle with issues of sin and salvation, with out creed or ritual of the church to maintain him, the evangelical obligation should subsequently be to make use of the state, the social arm of the built-in Christian group, to stamp out temptation and events for sin. Solely on this method might one carry out one’s divinely mandated obligation to maximise the salvation of others. And to the evangelical pietist, sin took on a particularly broad definition, inserting the necessities for holiness far past that of different Christian teams. As one antipietist Christian put it, “They noticed sin the place God didn’t.” Particularly, sin was any and all types of contact with liquor, and doing something besides praying and going to church on Sunday. Any types of playing, dancing, theater, studying of novels—briefly, secular enjoyment of any sort—had been thought-about sinful.
The types of sin that notably agitated the evangelicals had been these they held to intrude with the theological free will of people, making them unable to attain salvation. Liquor was sinful as a result of, they alleged, it crippled the free will of the imbibers. One other explicit supply of sin was Roman Catholicism, during which clergymen and bishops, arms of the Pope (whom they recognized because the Antichrist), dominated the minds and subsequently crippled the theological freedom of will of members of the church.
Evangelical pietism notably appealed to, and subsequently took root amongst, the “Yankees,” i.e., that cultural group that originated in (particularly rural) New England and emigrated broadly to populate northern and western New York, northern Ohio, northern Indiana, and northern Illinois. The Yankees had been pure “cultural imperialists,” individuals who had been wont to impose their values and morality on different teams; as such, they took fairly naturally to imposing their type of pietism via no matter means had been obtainable, together with the usage of the coercive energy of the state.
In distinction to evangelical pietists had been, along with small teams of old style Calvinists, two nice Christian teams, the Catholics and the Lutherans (or a minimum of, the high-church number of Lutheran), who had been “liturgicals” (or “ritualists”) reasonably than pietists. The liturgicals noticed the street to salvation in becoming a member of the actual church, obeying its rituals, and making use of its sacraments; the person was not alone with solely his feelings and the state to guard him. There was no explicit want, then, for the state to tackle the features of the church. Moreover, the liturgicals had a way more relaxed and rational view of what sin actually was; as an example, extreme consuming could be sinful, however liquor per se absolutely was not.
The evangelical pietists, from the 1830s on, had been the northern Protestants of British descent, in addition to the Lutherans from Scandinavia and a minority of pietist German synods; the liturgicals had been the Roman Catholics and the high-church Lutherans, largely German.
Very quickly, the political events mirrored a just about one-to-one correlation of this ethnoreligious division: the Whig, and later the Republican, occasion consisting mainly of the pietists, and the Democratic occasion encompassing virtually all of the liturgicals. And for nearly a century, on a state and native degree, the Whig/Republican pietists tried desperately and determinedly to stamp out liquor and all Sunday actions besides church (in fact, consuming liquor on Sunday was a heinous double sin). As to the Catholic church, the pietists tried to limit or abolish immigration, since individuals coming from Germany and Eire, liturgicals, had been outnumbering individuals from Britain and Scandinavia. Failing that and despairing of doing something about grownup Catholics poisoned by brokers of the Vatican, the evangelical pietists determined to focus on saving Catholic and Lutheran youth by attempting to remove the parochial faculties, via which each non secular teams transmitted their valuable non secular and social values to the younger. The item, as many pietists put it, was to “Christianize the Catholics,” to power Catholic and Lutheran kids into public faculties, which might then be used as an instrument of pietist Protestantization. Because the Yankees had early taken to the thought of imposing communal civic advantage and obedience via the general public faculties, they had been notably receptive to this new motive for aggrandizing public schooling.
To all of those persevering with aggressions by what they termed “these fanatics,” the liturgicals fought again with equal fervor. Significantly bewildered had been the Germans who, Lutheran and Catholic alike, had been accustomed to your complete household fortunately attending beer gardens collectively on Sundays after church and who now discovered the “fanatic” pietists attempting desperately to outlaw this pleasurable and seemingly harmless exercise. The pietist Protestant assaults on personal and parochial faculties fatally threatened the preservation and upkeep of the liturgicals’ cultural and spiritual values; and since giant numbers of the Catholics and Lutherans had been immigrants, parochial faculties additionally served to take care of group affinities in a brand new and sometimes hostile world—particularly the world of Anglo-Saxon pietism. Within the case of the Germans, it additionally meant, for a number of many years, preserving parochial instructing within the beloved German language, as towards fierce pressures for Anglicization.
Within the final three many years of the nineteenth century, as Catholic immigration grew and the Democratic occasion moved slowly however absolutely towards a majority standing, the Republican, and—extra broadly—pietist pressures grew to become extra intense. The aim of the general public college, to the pietists, was “to unify and make homogeneous the society.” There was no twentieth century concern for separating faith and the general public college system. On the contrary, in most northern jurisdictions solely pietist-Protestant church members had been allowed to be lecturers within the public faculties. Day by day studying of the Protestant Bible, every day Protestant prayers and Protestant hymns had been widespread within the public faculties, and faculty textbooks had been rife with anti-Catholic propaganda. Thus, New York Metropolis college textbooks spoke broadly of “the deceitful Catholics,” and pounded into their kids, Catholic and Protestant alike, the message that “Catholics are essentially, morally, intellectually, infallibly, a silly race.”
Lecturers delivered homilies on the evils of Popery, and in addition on deeply felt pietist theological values: the wickedness of alcohol (the “demon rum”) and the significance of maintaining the Sabbath. Within the Eighteen Eighties and Nineties, zealous pietists started working ardently for antialcohol instruction as a required a part of the public-school curriculum; by 1901, each state within the Union required instruction in temperance.
Since most Catholic kids went to public reasonably than parochial faculties, the Catholic authorities had been understandably anxious to purge the colleges of Protestant necessities and ceremonies, and of anti-Catholic textbooks. To the pietists, these makes an attempt to de-Protestantize the general public faculties had been insupportable “Romish aggression.” The entire level of the general public faculties was ethical and spiritual homogenization, and right here the Catholics had been disrupting the try and make American society holy—to supply, via the general public college and the Protestant gospel, “a morally and politically homogeneous individuals.” As Kleppner writes:
Once they [the pietists] spoke of “ethical schooling,” they’d in thoughts ideas of morality shared in widespread by the adherents of gospel faith, for within the public college all kids, even these whose mother and father had been enslaved by “Lutheran formalism or Romish supersitition,” could be uncovered to the Bible. That alone was trigger for righteous optimism, for they believed the Bible to be “the agent in changing the soul,” “the amount that makes human beings males.”
On this method, “America [would] be Saved Via the Kids.”
The pietists had been subsequently incensed that the Catholics had been making an attempt to dam the salvation of America’s kids—and ultimately of America itself—all on the orders of a “international potentate.” Thus, the New Jersey Methodist Convention of 1870 lashed out with their deepest emotions towards this Romish obstructionism:
Resolved, That we tremendously deprecate the hassle which is being made by “Haters of Gentle,” and particularly by an smug priesthood, to exclude the Bible from the Public Faculties of our land; and that we are going to do all in our energy to defeat the well-defined and depraved design of this “Mom of Harlots.”
All through the nineteenth century, “nativist” assaults on “foreigners” and the foreign-born had been actually assaults on liturgical immigrants. Immigrants from Britain or Scandinavia, pietists all, had been “good Individuals” as quickly as they acquired off the boat. It was the varied tradition of the opposite immigrants that needed to be homogenized and molded into that of pietist America. Thus, the New England Methodist Convention of 1889 declared:
We’re a nation of remnants, ravellings from the Outdated World. . . . The general public college is without doubt one of the remedial businesses which work in our society to decrease this . . . and to hasten the compacting of those heterogeneous supplies right into a strong nature.
Or, as a number one citizen of Boston declared, “the one option to elevate the international inhabitants was to make Protestants of their kids.”
Because the cities of the North, within the late nineteenth century, had been turning into more and more crammed with Catholic immigrants, pietist assaults on sinful cities and on immigrants each grew to become features of the anti-liturgical wrestle for a homogeneous Anglo-Saxon pietist tradition. The Irish had been explicit butts of pietist scorn; a New York Metropolis textbook bitterly warned that continued immigration might make America “the widespread sewer of Eire,” crammed with drunken and wicked Irishmen.
The rising inflow of immigrants from southern and japanese Europe towards the tip of the nineteenth century appeared to pose even larger issues for the pietist progressives, however they didn’t shrink from the duty. As Elwood P. Cubberley of Stanford College, the nation’s excellent progressive historian of schooling, declared, southern and japanese Europeans have served to dilute tremendously our nationwide inventory, and to deprave our civil life. . . . All over the place these individuals are likely to settle in teams or settlements, and to arrange right here their nationwide manners, customs, and observances. Our process is to interrupt up these teams or settlements, to assimilate and amalgamate these individuals as part of our American race and to implant of their kids. . . the Anglo-Saxon conception of rightousness, regulation and order, and widespread authorities. . . .
PROGRESSIVES, PUBLIC EDUCATION, AND THE FAMILY: THE CASE OF SAN FRANCISCO
The molding of kids was in fact the important thing to homogenization and the important thing basically to the progressive imaginative and prescient of tight social management over the person through the instrument of the state. The eminent College of Wisconsin sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross, a favourite of Theodore Roosevelt and the veritable epitome of a progressive social scientist, summed it up thus: The position of the general public official, and specifically of the general public college trainer, is “to gather little plastic lumps of human dough from personal households and form them on the social kneadingboard.”
The view of Ross and the opposite progressives was that the state should take up the duty of management and inculcation of ethical values as soon as carried out by mother and father and church. The battle between center and upper-class city progressive Anglo-Saxon Protestants and largely working-class Catholics was sharply delineated within the battle over management of the San Francisco public college system throughout the second decade of the 20th century. The extremely widespread Alfred Roncovieri, a French-Italian Catholic, was the elected college superintendent from 1906 on. Roncovieri was a traditionalist who believed that the perform of faculties was to show the fundamentals, and that instructing kids about intercourse and morality ought to be the perform of dwelling and church. Therefore, when the drive for intercourse hygiene programs within the public faculties acquired beneath method, Roncovieri consulted with moms’ golf equipment and, in consequence, saved this system out of the colleges.
By 1908, upper-class progressives launched a decade-long motion to oust Roncovieri and rework the character of the San Francisco public college system. As an alternative of an elected superintendent responding to a college board elected by districts, the progressives wished an omnipotent college superintendent, appointed by a rubber-stamp board that in flip could be appointed by the mayor. In different phrases, within the title of “taking the colleges out of politics,” they hoped to aggrandize the tutorial forms and preserve its energy just about unchecked by any widespread or democratic management. The aim was threefold: to push via the progressive program of social management, to impose upper-class management over a working-class inhabitants, and to impose pietist Protestant management over Catholic ethnics.
The ethnoreligious wrestle over the general public faculties in San Francisco was nothing new; it had been happening tumultuously because the center of the nineteenth century. Within the final half of the nineteenth century, San Francisco was break up into two components. Ruling town was an influence elite of native-born previous Individuals, hailing from New England, together with legal professionals, businessmen, and pietist Protestant ministers. These comprised successively the Whig, Know-Nothing, Populist, and Republican events within the metropolis. Then again had been the foreign-born, largely Catholic immigrants from Europe, Irish, Germans, French, and Italians, who comprised the Democratic occasion.
The Protestants early tried to make use of the general public faculties as a homogenizing and controlling power. The good theoretician and founding father of the general public college system in San Francisco, John Swett, “the Horace Mann of California,” was a lifelong Republican and a Yankee who had taught college in New Hampshire earlier than shifting West. Furthermore, the Board of Schooling was initially an all-New England present; consisting of emigrants from Vermont, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. The mayor of San Francisco was a former mayor of Salem, Massachusetts, and each administrator and trainer within the public faculties was a transplanted New Englander. The primary superintendent of faculties was not precisely a New Englander, however shut: Thomas J. Nevins, a Yankee Whig lawyer from New York and an agent of the American Bible Society. And the primary free public college in San Francisco was instituted within the basement of a small Baptist chapel.
Nevins, put in as superintendent of faculties in 1851, promptly adopted the rule of the New York Metropolis faculties: Each trainer was compelled to start every day by a Protestant Bible studying and to conduct every day Protestant prayer classes. And John Swett, elected as Republican state superintendent of public instruction throughout the 1860s, declared that California wanted public faculties due to its heterogeneous inhabitants: “Nothing can Americanize these chaotic components, and breathe into them the spirit of our establishments,” he warned, “besides the general public faculties.”
Swett was eager sufficient to acknowledge that the pietist academic formulation meant that the state takes over jurisdiction of the kid from his mother and father, since “kids arrived on the age of maturity belong, to not the mother and father, however to the State, to society, to the nation.”
A seesaw wrestle between the Protestant Yankees and Catholic ethnics ensued in San Francisco throughout the 1850s. The state constitution of San Francisco in 1855 made the colleges much more conscious of the individuals, with college boards being elected from every of a dozen wards as an alternative of at giant, and the superintendent elected by the individuals as an alternative of appointed by the board. The Democrats swept the Know-Nothings out of workplace within the metropolis in 1856 and dropped at energy David Broderick, an Irish Catholic who managed the San Francisco in addition to the California Democratic occasion. However this acquire was worn out by the San Francisco Vigilance Motion, a personal group of retailers and New England-born Yankees, who, attacking the “Tammany” ways of Broderick, put in themselves in energy and illegally deported many of the Broderick group, changing it with a newly fashioned Folks’s occasion.
The Folks’s occasion ran San Francisco with an iron hand for ten years, from 1857 to 1867, making secret nominations for appointments and driving via enormous slates of at-large nominees chosen at a single vote at a public assembly. No open nomination procedures, primaries, or ward divisions had been allowed, to be able to guarantee election victories by “respected” males. The Folks’s occasion promptly reinstalled an all-Yankee college board, and the directors and lecturers in faculties had been once more firmly Protestant and militantly anti-Catholic. The Folks’s occasion itself frequently attacked the Irish, denouncing them as “micks” and “rank Pats.” George Tait, the Folks’s party-installed superintendent of faculties within the 1860s, lamented, nonetheless, that some lecturers had been failing to learn the Protestant Bible within the faculties, and had been thus casting “a slur on the faith and character of the group.”
By the 1870s, nonetheless, the foreign-born residents outnumbered the native-born, and the Democratic occasion rose to energy in San Francisco, the Folks’s occasion declining and becoming a member of the Republicans. The Board of Schooling ended the follow of Protestant devotions within the faculties, and Irish and Germans started to pour into administrative and instructing posts within the public college system.
One other rollback started, nonetheless, in 1874, when the Republican state legislature abolished ward elections for the San Francisco college board, and insisted that each one board members be elected at giant. This meant that solely the rich, which normally meant well-to-do Protestants, had been doubtless to have the ability to run efficiently for election. Accordingly, whereas in 1873, 58 p.c of the San Francisco college board was foreign-born, the proportion was down to eight p.c within the following 12 months. And whereas the Irish had been roughly 25 p.c of the voters and the Germans about 13 p.c, the Irish weren’t capable of fill multiple or two of the twelve at-large seats, and the Germans just about none.
The seesaw continued, nonetheless, because the Democrats got here again in 1883, beneath the aegis of the grasp politician, the Irish Catholic Christopher “Blind Boss” Buckley. Within the Buckley regime, the post-1874 college board dominated completely by rich native-born, Yankee businessmen and professionals, was changed by an ethnically balanced ticket with a excessive proportion of working-class and foreign-born. Moreover, a excessive proportion of Irish Catholic lecturers, most of them single ladies, entered the San Francisco faculties throughout the Buckley period, reaching 50 p.c by the flip of the century.
Within the late Eighteen Eighties, nonetheless, the stridently anti-Catholic and anti-Irish American occasion grew to become sturdy in San Francisco and the remainder of the state, and Republican leaders had been glad to hitch them in denouncing the “immigrant peril.” The American occasion managed to oust the Irish Catholic Joseph O’Connor, principal and deputy superintendent, from his excessive put up as “religiously unacceptable.” This victory heralded a progressive Republican “reform” comeback in 1891, when none aside from John Swett was put in as superintendent of faculties in San Francisco. Swett battled for the total reform program: to make all the things, even the mayoralty, an appointive reasonably than an elective workplace. A part of the objective was achieved by the state’s new San Francisco constitution in 1900, which changed the twelve-man elected Board of Schooling by a four-member board appointed by the mayor.
The complete objective of complete appointment was nonetheless blocked, nonetheless, by the existence of an elective superintendent of faculties who, since 1907, was the favored Catholic Alfred Roncovieri. The pietist progressives had been additionally thwarted for twenty years by the truth that San Francisco was dominated, for many of the years between 1901 and 1911, by a brand new Union Labor occasion, which gained on an ethnically and occupationally balanced ticket, and which elected the German-Irish Catholic Eugene Schmitz, a member of the musician’s union, as mayor. And for eighteen years after 1911, San Francisco was ruled by its hottest mayor earlier than or since, “Sunny Jim” Rolph, an Episcopalian pleasant to Catholics and ethnics, who was pro-Roncovieri and who presided over an ethnically pluralistic regime.
It’s instructive to look at the make-up of the progressive reform motion that ultimately acquired its method and overthrew Roncovieri. It consisted of the usual progressive coalition of enterprise {and professional} elites, and nativist and anti-Catholic organizations, who known as for the purging of Catholics from the colleges. Specific inspiration got here from Stanford educationist Elwood P. Cubberley, who energized the California department of the Affiliation of Collegiate Alumnae (later the American Affiliation of College Girls), led by the rich Mrs. Jesse H. Steinhart, whose husband was later to be a frontrunner within the Progressive occasion. Mrs. Steinhart acquired Mrs. Agnes De Lima, a New York Metropolis progressive educator, to make a survey of the San Francisco faculties for the affiliation. The report, offered in 1914, made the anticipated case for an “environment friendly,” business-like, college system run solely by appointed educators. Mrs. Steinhart additionally organized the Public Schooling Society of San Francisco to agitate for progressive college reform; on this she was aided by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce.
Additionally backing progressive reform, and anxious to oust Roncovieri, had been different elite teams within the metropolis, together with the League of Girls Voters, and the distinguished Commonwealth Membership of California.
On the behest of Mrs. Steinhart and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, which contributed the funds, Philander Claxton of the U.S. Workplace of Schooling weighed in along with his report in December 1917. The report, which endorsed the Affiliation of Collegiate Alumnae examine and was extraordinarily vital of the San Francisco college system, known as for all energy over the system to go to an appointed superintendent of faculties. Claxton additionally attacked the instructing of international languages within the faculties, which San Francisco had been doing, and insisted on a complete “Americanization” to interrupt down ethnic settlements.
The Claxton Report was the sign for the Chamber of Commerce to swing into motion, and it proceeded to draft a complete progressive referendum for the November 1918 poll, calling for an appointed superintendent and an appointed college board. This initiative, Modification 37, was backed by many of the outstanding enterprise {and professional} teams within the metropolis. Along with those named above, there have been the Actual Property Board, elite ladies’s organizations such because the Federation of Girls’s Golf equipment, rich neighborhood enchancment golf equipment, and the San Francisco Examiner. Modification 37 misplaced, nonetheless, by two to 1, because it had little help in working-class neighborhoods or among the many lecturers.
Two years later, nonetheless, Modification 37 handed, aided by a resurgence of pietism and virulent anti-Catholicism in postwar America. Prohibition was now triumphant, and the Ku Klux Klan skilled a nationwide revival as a pietist, anti-Catholic group. The KKK had as many as 3,500 members within the San Francisco Bay Space within the early Nineteen Twenties. The anti-Catholic American Protecting Affiliation additionally loved a revival, led in California by a British small businessman, the anti-Irish Grand Grasp Colonel J. Arthur Petersen.
In opposing Modification 37 within the 1920 elections, Father Peter C. Yorke, a outstanding priest and Irish immigrant, perceptively summed up the basic cleavage: “The fashionable college system,” he declared, “will not be glad with instructing kids the three Rs . . . it reaches out and takes possession of their entire lives.”
Modification 37 handed in 1920 by the slender margin of 69,200 to 66,700. It handed in each middle- and upper-class Meeting District, and misplaced in each working-class district. The upper the focus of foreign-born voters in any district, the larger the vote towards. Within the Italian precincts 1 to 17 of the thirty third A.D., the Modification was overwhelmed by 3 to 1; within the Irish precincts, it was defeated by 3 to 1 as effectively. The extra Protestant a working-class district, the extra it supported the Modification.
The majority of the lobbying for the Modification was carried out by the advert hoc Academic Convention. After the victory, the convention fortunately offered an inventory of nominees to the varsity board, which now consisted of seven members appointed by the mayor, and which in flip appointed the superintendent. The proposed board consisted solely of businessmen, of whom just one was a conservative Irish Catholic. The mayor surrendered to the stress, and therefore, after 1921, cultural pluralism within the San Francisco college system gave option to unitary progressive rule. The board started by threatening to dock any trainer who dared to be absent from college on St. Patrick’s Day (a San Francisco custom because the 1870s), and proceeded to override the needs of explicit neighborhoods within the curiosity of a centralized metropolis.
The superintendent of faculties within the new regime, Dr. Joseph Marr Gwinn, match the brand new dispensation to a tee. An expert “scientist” of public administration, his avowed goal was unitary management. The complete bundle of typical progressive academic nostrums was put in, together with a division of schooling and numerous experimental applications. Conventional fundamental schooling was scorned, and the edict got here down that kids shouldn’t be “compelled” to be taught the three Rs in the event that they did not really feel the necessity. Conventional lecturers, who had been frequently attacked for being old style and “unprofessional,” weren’t promoted.
Regardless of continued opposition by lecturers, mother and father, neighborhoods, ethnic teams, and the ousted Roncovieri, all makes an attempt to repeal Modification 37 had been unsuccessful. The fashionable dispensation of progressivism had conquered San Francisco. The elimination of the Board of Schooling and faculty superintendent from direct and periodic management by the voters had successfully disadvantaged mother and father of any important management over the tutorial insurance policies of public faculties. Eventually, as John Swett had asserted practically sixty years earlier, schoolchildren belonged “to not the mother and father, however to the State, to society, to the nation.”
ETHNORELIGIOUS CONFLICT AND THE RISE OF FEMINISM
Girls’s Suffrage
By the Nineties, the liturgically oriented Democracy was slowly however absolutely successful the nationwide battle of the political events. Culminating the battle was the Democratic congressional victory in 1890 and the Grover Cleveland landslide within the presidential election of 1892, during which Cleveland carried each Homes of Congress together with him (an uncommon feat for that period). The Democrats had been in method of turning into the bulk occasion of the nation, and the basis was demographic: the truth that many of the immigrants had been Catholic and the Catholic birthrate was increased than that of the pietist Protestants. Though British and Scandinavian immigration had reached new highs throughout the Eighteen Eighties, their numbers had been far exceeded by German and Irish immigration, the latter being the best because the well-known post-potato-famine inflow that began within the late 1840s. Moreover, the “new immigration” from southern and japanese Europe, virtually all Catholic—and particularly Italian—started to make its mark throughout the identical decade.
The pietists grew to become more and more embittered, stepping up their assaults on foreigners basically and Catholics specifically. Thus, the Reverend T.W. Cuyler, President of the Nationwide Temperance Society, intemperately exclaimed in the summertime of 1891: “How for much longer [will] the Republic . . . consent to have her soil a dumping floor for all Hungarian ruffians, Bohemian bruisers, and Italian cutthroats of each description?”
The primary concrete political response by the pietists to the rising Catholic tide was to attempt to limit immigration. Republicans efficiently managed to go legal guidelines partially reducing immigration, however President Cleveland vetoed a invoice to impose a literacy check on all immigrants. The Republicans additionally managed to curtail voting by immigrants, by getting most states to disallow voting by aliens, thereby reversing the standard customized of permitting alien voting. Additionally they urged the lengthening of the statutory ready interval for naturalization.
The profitable limiting of immigration and of immigrant voting was nonetheless not sufficient to matter, and immigration would not likely be foreclosed till the Nineteen Twenties. But when voting couldn’t be restricted sharply sufficient, maybe it might be expanded—within the correct pietist course.
Particularly, it was clear to the pietists that the position of ladies within the liturgical “ethnic” household was very totally different from what it was within the pietist Protestant household. One of many causes impelling pietists and Republicans towards prohibition was the truth that, culturally, the lives of city male Catholics—nd the cities of the Northeast had been turning into more and more Catholic—developed across the neighborhood saloon. The lads would restore at night time to the saloon for chitchat, discussions, and argument—nd they’d typically take their political opinions from the saloonkeeper, who thus grew to become the political powerhouse in his explicit ward. Subsequently, prohibition meant breaking the political energy of the city liturgical machines within the Democratic occasion.
However whereas the social lives of liturgical males revolved across the saloon, their wives stayed at dwelling. Whereas pietist ladies had been more and more impartial and politically energetic, the lives of liturgical ladies revolved solely about dwelling and fireside. Politics was strictly an avocation for husbands and sons. Perceiving this, the pietists started to push for girls’s suffrage, realizing that much more pietist than liturgical ladies would make the most of the ability to vote.
Because of this, the ladies’s suffrage motion was closely pietist from the very starting. Ultrapietist third events just like the Buck and the Prohibition events, which scorned the Republicans for being untrustworthy moderates on social points, supported ladies’s suffrage all through, and the Populists tended in that course. The Progressive occasion of 1912 was strongly in favor of ladies’s suffrage; theirs was the primary main nationwide conference to allow ladies delegates. The primary girl elector, Helen J. Scott of Wisconsin, was chosen by the Progressive occasion.
Maybe the main single group within the ladies’s suffrage motion was the Girls’s Christian Temperance Union, based in 1874 and reaching an unlimited membership of 300,000 by 1900. That the WCTU was additionally concerned in agitating for curfew, antigambling, antismoking, and antisex legal guidelines—ll actions lauded by the ladies’s suffrage motion—s clear from the official historical past of ladies’s suffrage within the nineteenth century:
[The WCTU] has been a chief think about State campaigns for statutory prohibition, constitutional modification, reform legal guidelines basically and people for the safety of ladies and kids specifically, and in securing anti-gambling and anti-cigarette legal guidelines. It has been instrumental in elevating the “age of safety” for ladies in lots of States, and in acquiring curfew legal guidelines in 400 cities and cities. . . . The affiliation [WCTU] protests towards the legalization of all crimes, particularly these of prostitution and liquor promoting.
Not solely did Susan B. Anthony start her profession as an expert prohibitionist, however her two successors as president of the main ladies’s suffrage group, the Nationwide American Lady Suffrage Affiliation—Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt and Dr. Anna Howard Shaw—additionally started their skilled careers as prohibitionists. The main spirit of the WCTU, Frances E. Willard, was prototypically born of New England-stock mother and father who had moved westward to review at Oberlin School, then the nation’s middle of aggressive, evangelical pietism, and had later settled in Wisconsin. Guided by Miss Willard, the WCTU started its prosuffrage actions by demanding that girls vote in native choice referendums on prohibition. As Miss Willard put it, the WCTU wished ladies to vote on this situation as a result of “majorities of ladies are towards the liquor site visitors. . . .”
Conversely, at any time when there was a voters’ referendum on ladies’s suffrage, the liturgicals and the foreign-born, responding to immigrant tradition and reacting towards the pietist-feminist help of prohibition, constantly opposed ladies’s suffrage. In Iowa, the Germans voted towards ladies’s suffrage, as did the Chinese language in California. The ladies’s suffrage modification in 1896 in California was closely supported by the bitterly anti-Catholic American Protecting Affiliation. The cities, the place Catholics abounded, tended to be against ladies’s suffrage, whereas pietist rural areas tended to favor it. Thus, the Oregon referendum of 1900 misplaced largely due to opposition within the Catholic “slums” of Portland and Astoria.
A revealing non secular breakdown of votes on an 1877 ladies’s suffrage referendum was offered in a report by a Colorado feminist. She defined that the Methodists (essentially the most strongly pietistic) had been “for us,” the (much less pietistic) Presbyterians and Episcopalians “pretty so,” whereas the Roman Catholics “weren’t all towards us”—clearly they had been anticipated to be. And, testifying earlier than the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in favor of ladies’s suffrage in 1880, Susan B. Anthony offered her personal clarification of the Colorado vote:
In Colorado . . . 6,666 males vote “Sure.” Now, I’m going to explain the boys who voted “Sure.” They had been native-born males, temperance males, cultivated, broad, beneficiant, simply males, males who suppose. Then again, 16,007 voted “No.” Now, I’m going to explain that class of voters. Within the southern a part of that State are Mexicans, who communicate the Spanish language. . . . The huge inhabitants of Colorado is made up of that class of individuals. I used to be despatched out to talk in a voting precinct having 200 voters; 150 of these voters had been Mexican greasers, 40 of them foreign-born residents, and simply 10 of them had been born on this nation; and I used to be alleged to be competent to transform these males to let me have a lot proper on this Authorities as they’d. . .
A laboratory check of which ladies would end up to vote occurred; in Massachusetts, the place ladies got the ability to vote in class board elections from 1879 on. In 1888, giant numbers of Protestant ladies in Boston turned out to drive Catholics off the varsity board. In distinction, Catholic ladies scarcely voted, “thereby validating the, nativist tendencies of suffragists who believed that extension of full suffrage to ladies would supply a barrier towards additional Catholic affect.” Over the past twenty years of the nineteenth century “the extra hierarchical the church group and the extra formal the ritual, the larger was its opposition to ladies suffrage, whereas the democratically organized church buildings with little dogma tended to be extra receptive.”
4 mountain states adopted ladies’s suffrage within the early and mid-Nineties. Two, Wyoming and Utah, had been merely ratifying, as new states, a follow they’d lengthy adopted as territories: Wyoming in 1869 and Utah in 1870. Utah had adopted ladies’s suffrage as a aware coverage by the pietistic Mormons to weight political management in favor of their polygamous members, who contrasted to the Gentiles, largely miners and settlers who had been both single males or who had left their wives again East. Wyoming had adopted ladies’s suffrage in an effort to extend the political energy of its settled house owners, in distinction to the transient, cell, and sometimes lawless single males who peopled that frontier area.
No sooner had Wyoming Territory adopted ladies’s suffrage, than it grew to become evident that the change had benefited the Republicans, notably since ladies had mobilized towards Democratic makes an attempt to repeal Wyoming’s Sunday prohibition regulation. In 1871, each homes of the Wyoming legislature, led by its Democratic members, voted to repeal ladies’s suffrage, however the invoice was vetoed by the Republican territorial governor.
Two extra states adopting ladies’s suffrage within the Nineties had been Idaho and Colorado. In Idaho the drive, adopted by referendum in 1896, was led by the ultrapietistic Populists and by the Mormons, who had been dominant within the southern a part of the state. The Populist counties of Colorado gave a majority of 6,800 for girls’s suffrage, whereas the Republican and Democratic counties voted a majority of 500 towards.
It could be thought paradoxical {that a} motion—ladies’s suffrage—born and centered within the East ought to have had its earliest victories within the distant frontier states of the Mountain West. However the paradox begins to clear once we understand the pietist-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant nature of the frontiersmen, a lot of them Yankees hailing initially from that birthplace of American pietism, New England. Because the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, that nice celebrant of frontier beliefs, lyrically noticed:
Within the arid West these pioneers [from New England] have halted and have turned to understand an altered nation and altered social beliefs. . . . If we comply with again the road of march of the Puritan farmer, we will see how responsive he has all the time been to isms. . . . He’s the Prohibitionist of Iowa and Wisconsin, crying out towards German customs as an invasion of his conventional beliefs. He’s the Granger of Wisconsin, passing restrictive railroad laws. He’s the Abolitionist, the Anti-mason, the Millerite, the Lady Suffragist, the Spiritualist, the Mormon, of Western New York.
Eugenics and Beginning Management
Thus the ladies’s suffrage motion, dominated by pietist progressives, was not directed solely to attaining some summary precept of electoral equality between men and women. This was extra a way to a different finish: the creation of electoral majorities for pietist measures of direct social management over the lives of American households. They wished to find out by state intervention what these households drank and when and the place they drank, how they spent their Sabbath day, and the way their kids ought to be educated.
A method of correcting the more and more pro-Catholic demographics was to limit immigration; one other to advertise ladies’s suffrage. A 3rd method, typically promoted within the title of “science,” was eugenics, an more and more widespread doctrine of the progressive motion. Broadly, eugenics could also be outlined as encouraging the breeding of the “match” and discouraging the breeding of the “unfit,” the factors of “health” typically coinciding with the cleavage between native, white Protestants and the international born or Catholics—or the white-black cleavage. In excessive instances, the unfit had been to be coercively sterilized.
To the founding father of the American eugenics motion, the distinguished biologist Charles Benedict Davenport, a New Yorker of eminent New England background, the rising feminist motion was beneficent supplied that the variety of biologically superior individuals was sustained and the variety of the unfit diminished. The biologist Harry H. Laughlin, aide to Davenport, affiliate editor of the Eugenical Information, and extremely influential within the immigration restriction coverage of the Nineteen Twenties as eugenics skilled for the Home Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, careworn the good significance of reducing the immigration of the biologically “inferior” southern Europeans. For in that method, the organic superiority of Anglo-Saxon ladies could be protected.
Harry Laughlin’s report back to the Home Committee, printed in 1923, helped formulate the 1924 immigration regulation, which, along with drastically limiting complete immigration to the US, imposed nationwide origin quotas primarily based on the 1910 census, in order to weight the sources of immigration as a lot as potential in favor of northern Europeans. Laughlin later emphasised that American ladies should preserve the nation’s blood pure by not marrying what he known as the “coloured races,” during which he included southern Europeans in addition to blacks: for if “males with a small fraction of coloured blood might readily discover mates among the many white ladies, the gates could be thrown open to a closing radical race combination of the entire inhabitants.” To Laughlin the ethical was clear: “The perpetuity of the American race and consequently of American establishments relies upon upon the advantage and fecundity of American ladies.”
However the issue was that the fecund ladies weren’t the pietist progressives however the Catholics. For, along with immigration, one other supply of demographic alarm to the pietists was the far increased birthrate amongst Catholic ladies. If solely they might be induced to undertake contraception! Therefore, the contraception motion grew to become a part of the pietist armamentarium of their systemic wrestle with the Catholics and different liturgicals.
Thus, the distinguished College of California eugenicist, Samuel J. Holmes, lamented that “the difficulty with contraception is that it’s practiced least the place it ought to be practiced most.” Within the Beginning Management Overview, main organ of the contraception motion, Annie G. Porritt was extra particular, attacking “the folly of closing our gates to aliens from overseas, whereas having them huge open to the overwhelming progeny of the least fascinating components of our metropolis and slum inhabitants.” In brief, the beginning controllers had been saying that if one’s objective is to limit sharply the overall variety of Catholics, “coloured” southern European or no, then there isn’t a level in solely limiting immigration whereas the home inhabitants continues to extend.
The contraception and the eugenics motion subsequently went hand in hand, not the least within the views of the well-known chief of the contraception motion in the US: Mrs. Margaret Higgins Sanger, prolific creator, founder and long-time editor of the Beginning Management Overview. Echoing lots of the numerous strains of progressivism, Mrs. Sanger hailed the emancipation of ladies via contraception as the most recent in utilized science and “effectivity.” As she put it in her Autobiography:
In an age which has developed science and business and financial effectivity to their highest factors, so little thought has been given to the event of a science of parenthood, a science of maternity which might forestall this appalling and unestimated waste of womankind and maternal effort.
To Mrs. Sanger, “science” additionally meant stopping the breeding of the unfit. A faithful eugenicist and follower of C.B. Davenport, she actually chided the eugenics motion for not sufficiently emphasizing this significant level:
The eugenists wished to shift the contraception emphasis from much less kids for the poor to extra kids for the wealthy. We went again of that and sought first to cease the multiplication of the unfit. This appeared crucial and best step towards race betterrnent.
GATHERED TOGETHER: PROGRESSIVISM AS A POLITICAL PARTY
Progressivism was, to a terrific extent, the fruits of the pietist Protestant political impulse, the urge to control each side of American life, financial and ethical—even essentially the most intimate and essential features of household life. Nevertheless it was additionally a curious alliance of a technocratic drive for presidency regulation, the supposed expression of “value-free science,” and the pietist non secular impulse to save lots of America—and the world—by state coercion. Typically each pietistic and scientific arguments could be used, typically by the identical individuals, to attain the previous pietist objectives. Thus, prohibition could be argued for on non secular in addition to on alleged scientific or medicinal grounds. In lots of instances, main progressive intellectuals on the flip of the 20th century had been former pietists who went to varsity after which transferred to the political enviornment, their zeal for making over mankind, as a “salvation by science.” After which the Social Gospel motion managed to mix political collectivism and pietist Christianity in the identical bundle. All of those had been strongly interwoven components within the progressive motion.
All these traits reached their apogee within the Progressive occasion and its nationwide conference of 1912. The assemblage was a gathering of businessmen, intellectuals, lecturers, technocrats, effectivity consultants and social engineers, writers, economists, social scientists, and main representatives of the brand new career of social work. The Progressive leaders had been center and higher class, virtually all city, extremely educated, and virtually all white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of both previous or current pietist issues.
From the social work leaders got here upper-class girls bringing the blessings of statism to the plenty: Lillian D. Wald, Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, and above all, Jane Addams. Miss Addams, one of many nice leaders of progressivism, was born in rural Illinois to a father, John, who was a state legislator and a religious nondenominational evangelical Protestant. Miss Addams was distressed on the southern and japanese European immigration, individuals who had been “primitive” and “credulous,” and who posed the hazard of unrestrained individualism. Their totally different ethnic background disrupted the unity of American tradition. Nonetheless, the issue, in response to Miss Addams, might be simply remedied. The general public college might reshape the immigrant, strip him of his cultural foundations, and rework him right into a constructing block of a brand new and larger American group.
Along with writers {and professional} technocrats on the Progressive occasion conference, there have been skilled pietists galore. Social Gospel leaders Lyman Abbott, the Reverend R. Heber Newton, and the Reverend Washington Gladden had been Progressive occasion notables, and the Progressive candidate for governor of Vermont was the Reverend Fraser Metzger, chief of the Inter-Church Federation of Vermont. The truth is, the Progressive occasion proclaimed itself because the “recrudescence of the non secular spirit in American political life.”
Many observers, certainly, reported in surprise on the strongly non secular tone of the Progressive occasion conference. Theodore Roosevelt’s acceptance handle was considerably entitled, “A Confession of Religion,” and his phrases had been punctuated by “amens” and by a continuous singing of Christian hymns by the assembled delegates. They sang “Onward, Christian Troopers,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and at last the revivalist hymn, “Observe, Observe, We Will Observe Jesus,” besides that “Roosevelt” changed the phrase “Jesus” at each flip.
The New York Occasions of August 6, 1912, summed up the weird expertise by calling the Progressive assemblage “a conference of fanatics.” And, “It was not a conference in any respect. It was an assemblage of non secular lovers. It was such a conference as Peter the Hermit held. It was a Methodist camp following finished over into political phrases.”
Thus the foundations of at present’s large state intervention within the inner lifetime of the American household had been laid within the so-called “progressive period” from the 1870s to the Nineteen Twenties. Pietists and “progressives” united to regulate the fabric and sexual decisions of the remainder of the American individuals, their consuming habits, and their leisure preferences. Their values, the very nurture and schooling of their kids, had been to be decided by their betters. The non secular, organic, political, mental, and ethical elite would govern, via state energy, the character and high quality of American household life.
SIGNIFICANCE
It has been recognized for many years that the Progressive Period was marked by a radical progress within the extension and dominance of presidency in America’s financial, social, and cultural life. For many years, this nice leap into statism was naively interpreted by historians as a easy response to the larger want for planning and regulation of an more and more complicated financial system. In recent times, nonetheless, historians have come to see that rising statism on a federal and state degree might be higher interpreted as a worthwhile alliance between sure enterprise and industrial pursuits, in search of authorities to cartelize their business after personal efforts for cartels and monopoly had failed, and intellectuals, lecturers, and technocrats searching for jobs to assist regulate and plan the financial system in addition to restriction of entry into their professions. In brief, the Progressive Period re-created the age-old alliance between Huge Authorities, giant enterprise corporations, and opinion-molding intellectuals—an alliance that had most not too long ago been embodied within the mercantilist system of the sixteenth via eighteenth centuries.
Different historians uncovered an analogous course of on the native degree, particularly that of city authorities starting with the Progressive Period. Utilizing the affect of media and opinion leaders, upper-income and enterprise teams within the cities systematically took political energy away from the plenty and centralized this energy within the fingers of city authorities conscious of progressive calls for. Elected officers, and decentralized ward illustration, had been systematically changed both by appointed bureaucrats and civil servants, or by centralized at-large districts the place large-scale funding was wanted to finance election races. On this method, energy was shifted out of the fingers of the plenty and into the fingers of a minority elite of technocrats and upper-income businessmen. One outcome was a rise of presidency contracts to enterprise, a shift from “Tammany” kind charity by the political events to a taxpayer-financed welfare state, and the imposition of upper taxes on suburban residents to finance bond points and redevelopment schemes accruing to downtown monetary pursuits.
Over the past twenty years, academic historians have described an analogous course of at work in public, particularly city, college methods. The scope of the general public college was tremendously expanded, obligatory attendance unfold outdoors of New England and different “Yankee” areas throughout the Progressive Period, and a strong motion developed to attempt to ban personal faculties and to power everybody into the general public college system.
From the work of academic historians, it was clear that the leap into complete state management over the person and over social life was not confined, throughout the Progressive and certainly post-Progressive eras, to authorities and the financial system. A much more complete course of was at work. The enlargement of obligatory public education stemmed from the expansion of collectivist and anti-individualist ideology amongst intellectuals and educationists. The person, these “progressives” believed, have to be molded by the tutorial course of to evolve to the group, which in follow meant the dictates of the ability elite talking within the group’s title. Historians have lengthy been conscious of this course of. However the accruing perception into progressivism as a enterprise cartelizing gadget led historians who had deserted the simple equation of “businessmen” with “laissez faire” to see that each one the sides of progressivism—the financial and the ideological and academic—had been a part of an built-in entire. The brand new ideology amongst enterprise teams was cartelist and collectivist reasonably than individualist and laissez faire, and the social management over the person exerted by progressivism was neatly paralleled within the ideology and follow of progressive schooling. One other parallel to the financial realm, in fact, was the elevated energy and earnings accruing to the technocratic intellectuals controlling the varsity system and the financial system.
If the motion of enterprise and mental elites in turning towards progressivism was now defined, there was nonetheless a big hole within the historic clarification and understanding of progressivism and subsequently of the leap into statism starting within the early twentieth century. There was nonetheless a necessity to clarify mass voting conduct and the ideology and applications of the political events within the American electoral system. This chapter applies the illuminating findings of current “ethnoreligious historians” to important modifications that occurred throughout the Progressive Period within the energy of presidency over the household. Particularly, we talk about the motion to broaden the ability of the general public college and the educationist elite over the household, in addition to the ladies’s suffrage and eugenics motion, all essential options of the Progressive motion. In each case, we see the important hyperlink between these intrusions into the household and the aggressive drive by Anglo-Saxon Protestant “pietists” to make use of the state to “make America holy,” to stamp out sin and thereby guarantee their very own salvation by maximizing the salvation of others. Particularly, all of those measures had been half and parcel of the long-standing campaign by these pietists to scale back if not remove the position of “liturgicals,” largely Roman Catholics and high-church Lutherans, from American political life. The drive to stamp out liquor and secular actions on Sundays had long term into profitable Catholic and high-church Lutheran resistance. Obligatory public education was quickly seen as an indispensable weapon within the process of “Christianizing the Catholics,” of saving the souls of Catholic kids by utilizing the general public faculties as a Protestantizing weapon. The uncared for instance of San Francisco politics was urged as a case examine of this ethnoreligious political battle over the colleges and therefore over the best of Catholic mother and father to transmit their very own values to their kids with out struggling Anglo-Saxon Protestant obstruction. Girls’s suffrage was seized upon as a way of accelerating Anglo-Saxon Protestant voting energy, and immigration restriction in addition to eugenics was a technique of lowering the rising demographic problem of Catholic voters.
In sum, current insights into the cartelizing drive of assorted enterprise pursuits have supplied an essential clarification of the speedy progress of statism within the twentieth century. Ethnoreligious historical past offers a proof of mass voting conduct and political occasion applications that neatly complement the cartelizing clarification of the actions of enterprise elites.
