Education for Empire: American Schools, Race, and the Paths of Good Citizenship
288
Education for Empire: American Schools, Race, and the Paths of Good Citizenship
288eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Using case studies from around the country, Clif Stratton deftly shows that public schooling and colonialism were intimately intertwined. This book reveals how students—from Asians in the U.S. West and Hawai‘i to blacks in the South, Mexicans in the Southwest, and Puerto Ricans in the Caribbean and New York City—grappled with the expectations of citizenship imposed by nationalist professionals at the helm of curriculum and policy. Students of American history, American studies, and the history of education will find Education for Empire an eminently valuable book.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520961050 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 01/19/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Education for Empire
American Schools, Race, and the Paths of Good Citizenship
By Clif Stratton
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96105-0
CHAPTER 1
Geography, History, and Citizenship
These subjects are really three phases of one, namely, human life. ... Geography treats the earth as the home of man. History is the story of the past life of man. Civics has to do with the present social, industrial, and political relations of man.
CALVIN KENDALL AND GEORGE MIRICK, How to Teach the Fundamental Subjects, 1915
The social studies of the American high school should have for their conscious and constant purpose the cultivation of good citizenship. We may identify the "good citizen" of a neighborhood with the "thoroughly efficient member" of that neighborhood; but he will be characterized, among other things, by a loyalty and a sense of obligation to his city, State, and Nation as political units.
US BUREAU OF EDUCATION, "The Social Studies in Secondary Education,"1916
IN 1900, THE NEW YORK DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION sent a collection of student work to the Paris Exposition Universelle. Among the submissions were the geography transcriptions of thirteen-year-old Italian-American Charles Digennaro, a student at Public School 26 in Brooklyn. In his account of North America, Digennaro reported: "the most important [country] is the United States. This is because ... it has [a] temperate climate. ... It is just the kind of place for people to work in. ... The people of the United States have made more progress than any other nation in the world." Digennaro contrasted the climate of the United States with that of Canada, where "the people cannot work because it is too cold," and Mexico and Central America, "where it is so warm, the people are lazy." In addition to favorable climate, Digennaro recounted the racial makeup of the United States: "Most of the inhabitants are white, but there are also Chinese, Negroes, and Indians." Digennaro's commentary on the preeminence of the United States in the Western Hemisphere mirrored contemporary geographical and historical interpretations that filled the pages of the most widely assigned schoolbooks at the turn of the twentieth century. And while he wrote about geography and historical "progress," the tropes Digennaro offered aligned his assertions with the kinds of nationalist and racial thinking only good white citizens and ardent patriots could muster. His civics teacher would have likely approved.
Together, these three subjects — geography, history, and civics — brought into focus a world in which race and empire were paramount in shaping the contours of national citizenship. The authors of school geography textbooks and curricula opened for schoolchildren the widest possible lens through which to see themselves and the United States in the world. Lessons emphasized three key threads of racial and imperial thought. First, they proved a critical means through which schoolchildren "[learned] to divide the world" into metageographical and racial categories. Undergirded by the science of evolution and by social Darwinism, authors offered continental and national schematics of human development that relied on the language of civilization, barbarism, and savagery. Cartographies of climate provided absolution for modern forms of empire and carried with them a host of economic and sociological arguments that validated Herbert Spencer's "survival of the fittest" theory of human inequality. Authors further claimed that geographic determinism did not apply to Anglo-Saxon settlers in the world's tropical and semitropical regions. To this end, they presented imagined reserved, open, and abundant landscapes where Europeans and Americans carried out the business of civilization at the expense of "barbarous tribes," according to one author.
Schoolbook histories in turn cast the United States and white Americans as an exceptional nation and people within the broader scope of world nations and races imparted through geography lessons. The Monroe Doctrine, the US War with Mexico, and the Spanish-American War provided explanations for America's ascendancy to global and industrial power. Critical to these imperial narratives were the discourses of race and civilization. But most importantly for this study, despite in many cases the denial of American forms of imperialism by most authors of the day, empire punctuated and buttressed historical narratives used in schools. Its language of civilization, economic imperatives, and implications for national allegiance made empire a far more usable and animated historical framework than is generally ascribed to the otherwise boilerplate US histories published after about 1890.
If geography and history normalized for students the "natural" hierarchies of the world and nation in which they lived, civics offered approved ways to think and act as citizens of an exceptional nation and ascendant global power. Emerging in the curriculum in the 1890s, community civics intended to create patriotic citizens, deferential managers, docile workers, and for those with the franchise, predictable voters for a two-party system through active, localized participation in the national community of citizens, workers, and consumers. Courses and texts stressed cleanliness, industriousness, and loyalty and pitted capitalism against the radicalism of striking immigrant workers, a subject of utmost concern for school officials in New York City for example, subjects of the book's fifth chapter. After the US entrance into World War I and the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, civics lessons commanded greater political and ideological conformity in efforts to dissolve the threats of collective organization by working-class nonwhites and immigrants. By the early 1920s, the American melting pot of races of the early twentieth century gave way to more rigid racial lines and an emphasis on cultural homogeneity and unquestioned loyalty to the state. But challenges to the postwar conformity of Americanism and the restrictionism of immigration debates emerged in tandem, transforming curricula from the 1920s onward.
Despite a spike in the sheer number of schoolbook titles published in the late nineteenth century to meet the demands of rapidly expanding public school bureaucracies throughout the country, a relatively small number of titles in each discipline made significant impacts or had longevity. That is, few books made it into large numbers of classrooms in the largest urban school districts or were reissued for multiple editions. These narratives were either written by or directly descended from some of the leading practitioners of the period, who steadfastly believed they imparted to schoolchildren geographical, historical, and political truths derived from objective science. In geography, books authored by Harvard's William Morris Davis, Cornell's Ralph Tarr, Colgate's Albert Perry Brigham, and Alexis Everett Frye, first school superintendent of the US occupation of Cuba, among several others, became the "leading" and "definitive" geographical texts of the period. They offered, according to their publishers, "definite science instead of the haphazard way" typical of earlier books that emphasized description over explanation. Ginn & Company, which operated seven national distribution houses, argued of its author Frye that his "books have a national use and are endorsed by the leaders of educational thought and methods as the most logical, the most practical, and the most suggestive text-books on the subject." The emphasis on logic and practicality informed how school geographers came to see their mission by 1900: to provide students with a worldview organized "according to principles of race, environment, and nationalism."
In history, Harvard's Albert Bushnell Hart, Penn's John Bach McMaster, and Columbia-trained Charles Beard, for example, fashioned themselves professionals who claimed the mantles of objectivity and historical truth but also regarded schools and school history as engines of "legitimating the social and political order." In 1910, Hart charged professional historians with seeking a "genuinely scientific school of history ... which shall dispassionately and moderately set forth results." At the close of World War I, American Book Company confirmed this methodological claim, arguing that Hart's school histories gave "young people a new and broader understanding of our true relations, both past and present, with other countries" in ways that were "decidedly patriotic ... yet devoid of 'spread-eagleism.'" While some professional historians began to question their closely held "faith in [historical] progress" after the war, Hart's optimistic ideological outlook, evident in his School History of the United States (1920) and New American History (2nd ed., 1921), seemed to persist. The consensus schoolbook historians of the period claimed to wield an "authentic and sound" patriotism, in the words of historian Peter Novick, and an "intelligent, tolerant patriotism," according to the American Historical Association's 1899 Committee of Seven.
Civics then served as a kind of applied social science that extended from the presumed objective nature of geographical and historical study. In more intentional and overt ways, civics celebrated patriotism and national exceptionalism, at times seemingly as ends in themselves. Because civics courses and textbooks were rather novel in the late nineteenth century, their architects tended to come from the ranks of school administrations and teaching forces instead of the faculties of leading colleges and universities. Indeed in many school districts throughout the country, civics was simply part of the American history curriculum. But by 1915, the National Education Association endorsed community civics, what Julie Reuben has called a "radical departure from earlier forms of citizenship education," because it de-emphasized political participation in favor of more benign and undefined acts of community engagement. Thus, school civics sought to carve out ways for all citizens to actively contribute to American economic and social progress, even if legal statute or local white resistance barred many newcomers and racial minorities from political activism, especially voting. So while on the surface the new community civics seemed to run counter to the kinds of rigid racial hierarchies taught in geography or the Anglo-Saxonism of school histories, in practice the three reinforced each other. In the early twentieth century, despite the rhetoric of "community" and of "active and intelligent" cooperation, civics was still about national conformity to the hierarchies of race, the imperatives of empire, and the politics of immigration.
METAGEOGRAPHIES OF RACE AND EMPIRE
In their 1899 Complete Geography, which Werner School Book Company pedaled as "in full harmony with the most advanced ideas on the 'New Geography,'" Horace and Martha Tarbell asked primary school children about presumed novelties: "Have you ever seen a negro? An Indian? A Chinaman?" The authors' use of the interrogative revealed several assumptions about audience. That students may have yet to lay eyes on a "negro" or an "Indian" or a "Chinaman" in their own lives certainly affirmed that the Tarbells believed their readership to be overwhelmingly and unequivocally white. It followed then that other races provided imperial spectacle for inquisitive, curious, and racially and culturally homogeneous schoolchildren whose daily interactions rarely or never transgressed racial lines. The authors continued: "The Caucasian or white race is the most intelligent and most powerful of all the races." Schools were in fact much more racially heterogeneous if not necessarily integrated than the Tarbells assumed, but the authors' ignorance or denial of the realities of racial diversity accompanied by a commonly constructed racial hierarchy helped shape and reinforce visions of the United States as a white republic for its neophyte citizens. While geography lessons underscored American whiteness as an essential lesson for schoolchildren, the study of the Earth, its continental and national divisions, its climatic variations, and the racial varieties of its human inhabitants reinforced this consciousness and served as spatial justification for an expansive US empire.
School geographers repackaged for schoolchildren three major tenets of American racial and imperial thought that affirmed the centrality of race and geographic origin to questions of citizenship, national belonging, and empire building. First, textbook authors drew on Darwinian theories of evolution to outline and detail three stages of human development, most commonly described as savagery, barbarism, and civilization. Not merely descriptions but instead analytical scientific frameworks through which to understand humans and their relationship to the natural world, school geographers argued that to the trained eye, these stages presented themselves among contemporary racial groups, including "Philippine savages," "naked [Japanese] natives," and "dark- eyed, languid [Mexican] women," at one end of the spectrum, and "intelligent" and "powerful" whites at the other end. William Morris Davis, "the father of American geography," saw the new physical geography of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a critical window into "the progress of mankind from the savage to the civilized state ... largely made by taking advantage of favorable geographic conditions." Evolution then served as scientific evidence of the privilege of white citizenship in the United States and the nation's rightfully endowed position as a burgeoning global power by the early twentieth century. Its allegedly common racial heritage with strong European empires, especially Great Britain, further confirmed the distinction.
Lessons then mapped these grand divisions of race onto the Earth's climate zones. The scientific and anthropological debates among European and American intellectuals, most of whom occupied distinguished positions at leading colleges and universities, including Ellen Churchill Semple (University of Chicago), Ellsworth Huntington (Yale University), and Charles Henry Pearson (Trinity, later University of Melbourne, Australia), found simplified form and resonance among colleagues that in turn narrated these arguments for primary and secondary schoolchildren. Despite disagreement over factors including blood purity, miscegenation, and global migration, these intellectuals agreed that differences in physical environment produced racial and cultural differences. The frigid, temperate, and torrid zones served as the cartographic framework to arrange and understand varied human racial typology — critical foundations for the justification of modern forms of imperialism that employed race as a primary marker of subjecthood, belonging, and power. Environment determined, according to climatological arguments, not only skin color, but also degrees of intelligence, industriousness, and the likelihood of one's economic and social status and survival. The imperatives for educational policy could not have been more immediate. As subsequent chapters demonstrate, administrators used the kinds of claims about climate and race found in the pages of geography readers to argue that nonwhite children throughout the United States and its territories should receive manual training for agricultural and domestic work in lieu of an academic education. Because many white educators regarded Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and African Americans, for example, as members of "tropical races," their natural environments made them innately lazy and immoral but also well suited to toil in fieldwork. As a remedy, they needed lessons in productivity and morality.
Finally, geography textbooks conveyed the exceptionalism of the United States so crucial to its national historical narrative by embedding its people, climate, resources, landscapes, and political institutions within metageographical constructs of the world and its populations. But to do so, school geographers had to sidestep, qualify, or in some cases challenge the orderly schematics of climate, continents, and evolution that rendered Native Americans savages in the temperate zone, African Americans tropical races flourishing in the US South (though ostensibly under white tutelage), and white Europeans and Americans industrious empire-builders in the semitropical and torrid zones. The end results were at times twinned racial and national exceptionalisms that either avoided evolutionary and environmental explanations altogether or in other cases challenged them head-on.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Education for Empire by Clif Stratton. Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Good Citizens
1 • Geography, History, and Citizenship
2 • Visions of White California
3 • Hawaiian Cosmopolitans and the American Pacific
4 • Black Atlanta’s Education through Labor
5 • Becoming White New Yorkers
6 • Colonial Citizens, Deportable Citizens
Epilogue: Knowledge and Citizenship
Notes
Works Cited
Index