"The Queen of the Lobby": Mary Hunt, Scientific Temperance, and the Dilemma of
Democratic Education in America, 1879-1906
Author(s): Jonathan Zimmerman
Source: History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 1, (Spring, 1992), pp. 1-30
Published by: History of Education Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/368397
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"The Queen of the Lobby": Mary Hunt,
Scientific Temperance, and the Dilemma of
Democratic Education in America, 18791906
Jonathan Zimmerman
Pennsylvania's statehouse, the journalist surmised, had "never witnessed
such a sight." Neither had he. Gazing across the galleries, he was
astounded to find them packed-with women. Women! Women crowding the benches, women standing in doorways, and women "clustered
in bunches of color in the narrow little aisles"-all awaiting news of
Pennsylvania's "scientific temperance" bill, which faced a final vote that
afternoon. The bill would require all state public schools to provide
instruction in "the nature and effects of alcoholic drinks and other narcotics." Additionally, all new teachers would be required to pass an
examination in the subject, which would have to be taught "as thoroughly
as other required branches"-and schools that failed to comply with the
legislation risked the loss of state education funds.
Following debate, the measure passed by an overwhelming margin.
But the journalist's report from the Pennsylvania statehouse on 31 March
1885 does not detail the lawmakers' deliberations. Instead, the writer's
attention remained riveted on the unique configuration of spectators.
"When Speaker Graham announced the final vote the gallery became
white with waving handkerchiefs," he wrote. "There wasn't a sound,
save when the members turning in their seats saw the fluttering signals
of victory, and . . . burst into applause."'
Jonathan Zimmerman is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Johns Hopkins University. His
essay was awarded the Henry Barnard Prize for 1991. He would like to thank the following
readers for their advice and encouragement in the preparation of this essay: Brian Balogh,
JoAnne Brown, Kathryn Fuller, Louis Galambos, Michael Katz, James Mohr, Philip Pauly,
William Reese, Doug Rossinow, Margaret Rung, Amy Schutt, and especially Ronald
Walters.
i Amendment Herald (Pittsburgh), Apr. 1885, frame 110, roll 14, Temperance and
Prohibition Papers, Ohio Historical Society (joint Ohio Historical Society-Michigan Historical Collections), Scientific Temperance Federation Series (hereafter STF Series).
History of Education Quarterly
Vol. 32
No. 1
Spring 1992
2
Historyof EducationQuarterly
As always, there was a great deal that the journalist did not report.
He did not report-perhaps he did not know-why these members were
applauding. In most of their districts, the women had established organizations that pushed for scientific temperance by "creating and focalizing
public sentiment upon individual legislators," in accordance with a published plan of action. The plan called for a mass meeting, a carriage, and
a vote: the mass meeting would be held in each lawmaker's hometown,
the carriage would be hired to insure that he attended, and the vote
would be tallied at the end of the meeting to insure that he understood.
("This vote," the plan noted, "will seldom fail to be unanimous"-in
favor of scientific temperance, of course.) Later, if the member went back
on his word, another meeting might be held-and then another. "Remember at every step that this is a government of the people," the plan
advised, "and therefore reach the law maker through his people." The
women had complied; the plan had worked; and now the "law maker"
applauded, fearful of the powerful new force that lurked behind those
fluttering handkerchiefs.2
These women, then, were hardly the passive petitioners of the journalist's fancy. Nor were their politics unique to Pennsylvania. Under the
direction of Mary H. Hunt, the peripatetic "Queen of the Lobby," women
would use similar strategies to win compulsory Scientific Temperance
Instruction (STI) in every state and territory in America by 1901. But
legislative triumphs could not assure compliance within the schools,
which routinely flouted state authority. Flooding school boards, offices,
and classrooms on behalf of their new laws, STI women clashed, first,
with this venerable tradition of localism and, then, with an ascendant
cult of expertise. A small cadre of professionals gained control of the
schools, eliminating virtually all lay challenges-except Scientific Temperance, which would continue to thrive throughout the Progressive Era.
lndeed, STI would continue, into the present, to underscore the
promise and the problems of democratic education in America. Schools
in the United States remain dominated by a closed circle of experts, subject
only to scattered, sporadic outside pressure. Yet a healthy democracy
requires an ongoing, broad-gauged conversation about "individualism"
and "community"-about, that is, the rights and the duties of its citizens.
Educational policy would seem uniquely suited for such a dialog because
schools represent our central public mechanism of social reproduction.
2 E.
Benedict, "History of the Temperance Education Movement," frame 108, roll 14,
STF Series; Woman's Christian Temperance Union, The Pathfinder: Or National Plans for
Securing Scientific Temperance Education in Schools and Colleges (New York, 1885), 815.
"The Queen of the Lobby"
3
"Reproduction" need not imply "repression." A genuinely democratic
education would allow Americans to debate and transmit consensual
values while protecting vital individual liberties. Admittedly, this definition implies a tolerance that would have puzzled most STI women.
Tearing a swath through turn-of-the-century schools and legislatures,
Mary Hunt and her supporters did not pause to deliberate the rights of
dissenters. As the STI experience suggests, however, even citizens who
endeavor to restrict conversation may-in practice-enhance it. Unlike
the subsequent anti-evolution crusade, Scientific Temperance would engage hundreds of thousands of Americans in a compelling dialog about
their schools and their society-without "compelling belief" in anyone.3
*
?*
*
*.
"It is not too much to say that the school boards of the country . . . are
in a state of siege at the hands of the mothers." Confidence cascaded off
the pages of Mary Hunt's 1880 report. Chosen the previous year to chair
the "temperance text-books" committee of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Hunt had called on each local WCTU to select "two or
more persons" who would visit their school board to demand that these
texts enter the "regular course of study." From Maine to Indiana, women
held "mass meetings," petition drives, and teacher institutes-then converged upon school boards to press their case. Dozens of towns had
already adopted the books, buckling under this barrage of matronly
might. Others were sure to follow.4
But Hunt's hopes proved premature, forcing a shift in strategy. Just
a year later, the WCTU would resolve to seek compulsory temperance
education laws in state legislatures. School boards, it seems, were not as
3 Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American
Life (Berkeley, Calif., 1985); Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton, N.J.,
1987); Stephen Arons, Compelling Belief: The Culture of American Schooling (New York,
1983). For accounts that link STI to the anti-evolution movement, see David Tyack, Thomas
James, and Aaron Benavot, Law and the Shaping of Public Education, 1785-1954 (Madison, Wis., 1987), ch. 6; Howard K. Beale, A History of Freedom of Teaching in American
Schools (New York, 1978; orig. 1941), ch. 6. Other accounts of scientific temperance
appear in Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 18731900 (Philadelphia, 1981), 135-38; Norton Mezvinsky, "The White-Ribbon Reform,
1874-1920" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1959), ch. 7; idem, "Scientific Temperance Instruction in the Schools," History of Education Quarterly 1 (Spring 1961): 4856; James H. Timberlake, Prohibition and the Progressive Movement, 1900-1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), ch. 2.
4 Report of the Committee of the Woman's National Christian Temperance Union on
Temperance Text-Books in Schools and Colleges (n.p., 1880), frames 18-20, roll 8, STF
Series; National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Plan of Work for the Introduction
of Scientific Temperance Text Books into Colleges, Normal, and Public Schools (n.p.,
1879), frames 1-15, roll 8, STF Series.
History of Education Quarterly
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"TheQueen of the Lobby"
5
pliant as Hunt had pictured. "[W]e have found our Gilbraltar in the
district board," complained a Michigan woman. "These gentlemen are
respectful to the voting and tax-paying power that elects them . . . and
in them a solid wall has been found, especially in the cities." Yet Michigan
was among the handful of states where women could vote in school
board elections-and remove recalcitrant board members, according to
Hunt's original plan. The plan flopped. "[A] very small percentage of
the women qualified themselves under the provisions of this [school
suffrage] act," recalled the Vermont WCTU president. "Two years of
trial proved that we needed to raise temperance from a permissive to a
regular study in the schools." In other words, school suffrage would
never guarantee STI; a statewide, statehouse strategy was needed. After
several early setbacks in New York-which had also instituted school
suffrage-Hunt discarded the election effort and shifted to legislative
lobbying, recruiting local women to organize and "focalize" pressure on
their representatives.5It worked. In 1884, New York passed its first STI
law.6
In the case of Hunt and STI, then, women's resistance to suffrage
in the 1880s stemmed not from a lingering "conservatism" or ingrained
passivity (as several scholars have implied)7 but from a well-founded
distrust of electoral processes.8 The grim fate of state constitutional pro-
s Minutes of the Eighth Convention of the National Woman's Christian Temperance
Union (Brooklyn, 1881), 41; Address of Mrs. M. L. Lathrop, quoted in "M. B. W.," "Tenth
Annual Convention of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of Michigan, Held at
Adrian, May 23, 24, 25, 26, 27," Union Signal, 7 June 1883; J. C. Perkins, "History of
Scientific Temperance Instruction in Vermont," frame 646, roll 14, STF Series. By 1890,
nineteen states had granted some form of "school suffrage" to women. See National
American Woman Suffrage Association, Victory, How Women Won It: A Centennial
Symposium, 1840-1940 (New York, 1940), 165.
6 The New York law was the linchpin of Hunt's regional strategy, which initially
targeted large eastern states. The Midwest-site of the original WCTU "Crusade"-lagged
slightly behind the East in embracing STI. Slowest of all was the South: nine of the fourteen
states still resisting STI in 1890 hailed from Dixie.
7 Ruth Bordin describes the WCTU as a bridge between "conservative" American
women and more "radical" suffragists; similarly, Barbara Epstein describes the Union as
a temporary way station on the road from domesticity to feminism. Bordin, Woman and
Temperance, 158; BarbaraLeslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism,
and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, Conn., 1981), ch. 5. See
also Janet Giele Zollinger, "Social Change in the Feminine Role: A Comparison of Woman's
Suffrage and Woman's Temperance, 1870-1920" (Ph.D. diss., Radcliffe College, 1961);
Ross Evans Paulson, Women's Suffrage and Prohibition: A Comparative Study of Equality
and Social Control (Glenview, 111.,1973). But see also Jack S. Blocker, Jr., "Give to the
Winds Thy Fears": The Women's Temperance Crusade, 1873-1874 (Westport, Conn.,
1985), ch. 5; Naomi Rosenthal et al., "Social Movements and Network Analysis: A Case
Study of Nineteenth-Century Women's Reform in New York State," American Journal of
Sociology 90 (Mar. 1985): 1044-45.
8 Hunt continued to encourage women to vote in school elections. Like many other
6
Historyof EducationQuarterly
hibition during the same era merely confirmed these suspicions. Voters
defeated twelve of the twenty prohibition referenda held during the decade-and states often failed to enforce the amendments that passed.
Surveying the wreckage, Hunt drew a clear and unequivocal lesson. Since
"a government of the people cannot compel majorities," she wrote, voters
"must first be convinced that alcohol and kindred narcotics are by nature
outlaws, before they will outlaw them." Here, of course, Hunt joined a
debate between persuasion and coercion-"moral suasion" versus "legal
suasion"-that had racked temperance and other American reform movements throughout the nineteenth century. Legal suasionists had won a
series of smashing victories-the so-called "Maine Laws"-in the early
1850s, only to see state after state repeal prohibition as attention shifted
to sectional rivalries and war. Some historians describe a "paradoxical
heightening" of prohibition support in the wake of the Maine Law debacle, while others document a renewed appreciation for moral suasion
and a skepticism of law.9 The vast appeal of STI derived, in part, from
its ability to bridge these dual streams of temperance sentiment. Simultaneously coercive and persuasive, an STI law used legal suasion by adults
to institutionalize moral suasion of the young.
Additionally, of course, STI's appeal lay in the gender of its advocates. In a landmark article, Paula Baker showed how widening male
suffrage and partisanship during the Age of Jackson hinged upon a "domestication" of women, whose "separate sphere" became a symbolic
repository for the republican virtues that the tumultuous, competitive
world of male politics had jettisoned. More recently, Lori Ginzberg has
argued that the rhetoric of separate spheres (among both antebellum
actors and their current chroniclers) masks the widespread incursions by
WCTU members, however, she "doubted the expediency" of a suffrage-centered strategy.
In states where women had won a limited vote, intimidation and red tape often discouraged
them from exercising it. Mary H. Hunt, Plan of Work of the Scientific Department of the
National and International Woman's Christian Temperance Union (Boston, 1888), 48;
Vermont Chronicle, 9 May 1884, quoted in Deborah P. Clifford, "The Drive for Women's
Municipal Suffrage in Vermont, 1883-1917," Vermont History 47 (Summer 1979): 179;
Carolyn De Swarte Gifford and June 0. Underwood, "Intertwined Ribbons: The Equal
Suffrage Association and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union" (paper delivered at
conference on "The Female Sphere: The Dynamics of Women Together in Nineteenth
Century America," New Harmony, Ind., 8-10 Oct. 1981), 27, 31. On "expediency" in
the woman's suffrage movement, see Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage
Movement, 1890-1 920 (New York, 1965).
9 Jack S. Blocker, Jr., American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform (Boston,
1989), 88, 91; Mary H. Hunt, A History of the First Decade of the Department of Scientific
Temperance Instruction in Schools and Colleges (Boston, 1892), v. For an account stressing
legal suasion after the 1850s, see Ian Tyrrell, "Women and Temperance in Antebellum
America, 1830-1860," Civil War History 28 (June 1982): 141-42; for an account emphasizing moral suasion during the same era, see Blocker, Give to the Winds, 171-72.
"The Queen of the Lobby"7
7
women into this purportedly male political realm. Women eagerly participated in every dimension of the early nineteenth-century "Benevolent
Empire," including fund-raising, teaching, and petitioning. They clothed
their achievements in paeans to "purity," which merely obscured the
extent to which their actual activity mirrored their male counterparts.
Hunt and her STI minions extended this elaborate charade, reinforcing
the equally resilient fiction that schools-and school actors-were "above
politics." To evince such impartiality, Hunt's Progressive critics would
cite their new skills and credentials; Hunt, by contrast, would invoke the
much older tradition of female virtue. "That there are women who make
the platform a means to gratify selfish ambition, no one denies, just as
there are such men," Hunt admitted, "but as everyone acknowledges
woman's moral nature to be purer than man's, than by just so much, do
we claim there are fewer such women than men." This revamped gender
imagery allowed women to influence legislatures in ways that even men
could not. In New York, which had recently barred lobbyists from the
floor of the state capitol, Hunt ambled past the guards and "lobbied
indefatigably," as an astounded newspaperman noted.'0
Finally, Hunt's legislative strategy also echoed the centralizing idiom
of the American common school movement. Feuding with a tenacious
tradition of local control, antebellum schoolmen like Horace Mann contemplated-but neyer consummated-state consolidation and regulation
of public education. The systems they imagined would not proliferate
until after Reconstruction, when most of America-a polity of "courts
and parties"-witnessed a dramatic decline of governmental presence
and power. But school bureaucracies boomed, as the vast majority of
states enacted constitutional or statutory provisions for state and county
school superintendents, school taxes, compulsory attendance, teacher
institutes, and so on. Yet this growth-like its modest antebellum antecedents-proceeded in staccato rhythm, with large-scale administrative
buildups punctuated by occasional contractions. Moreover, the new systems failed to achieve the authority that Mann had craved. Localities
10Paula Baker, "The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society,
1780-1920," American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): esp. 631; Lori D. Ginzberg,
Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the NineteenthCentury United States (New Haven, Conn., 1990); Hunt, "Sample Lecture" (n.d.), frame
949, roll 13, STF Series; Argus (Albany), 1 Aug. 1895, frame 212, roll 10, STF Series. On
female reform activity in the antebellum era, see Barbara Berg, The Remembered Gate:
Origins of American Feminism: The Woman and the City, 1800-1860 (New York, 1978);
on the ever-popular canard that schools are "above politics," see David B. Tyack, The One
Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, 1974), 11; David Tyack
and Elisabeth Hansot, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 18201980 (New York, 1982), 7; Tyack et al., Law and the Shaping of Public Education, 25.
History of Education Quarterly
8
continued to ignore state statutes and to mock state schoolmen, who
faced the unenviable task of executing provisions without enforceable
penalties. They resorted to pretentious titles that aggravated their opposition-or to desperate pleas that accentuated their impotence." Resembling preachers more than bureaucrats, state educators took few other
deliberate steps to enlist a suspicious public. For they still supposed that
Americans shared "the same ethical system," as Robert Wiebe writes;
hence they sought "not to convince people but simply to rouse them."
After that, educators assumed, "like-minded legions across the land"
would "translate their dream into practice."'2
Mary Hunt made no such assumption. Sharing educators' penchant
for state policy, Hunt and her minions added a new accent upon local
politics. In place of the informal WCTU "text-book committee," Hunt's
Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction spawned a vast women's army of state, county, and local STI "superintendents" to establish
and then enforce compulsory alcohol education. For superintendents at
each level, Hunt designed a "plan of work" with step-by-step instructions
for mobilizing a clientele on behalf of STI. Eschewing political parties,
Hunt's plans stressed direct, single-issue pressure on elected representatives through demonstrations, meetings, petitions, pamphlets, and letters.
These plans explicitly presumed attitudinal differences between voters,
especially between urban and rural Americans. "Only one-fifth of our
population lives in cities," Hunt's 1883 plan emphasized. Hence "majorities . . . are in the rural districts," which are "more easily reached
and influenced for temperance" than are cities. "Work chiefly in the rural
districts for temperance representatives and senators," the plan concluded.
'3
By 1890, less than a decade after the legislative effort began, thirtyfive of forty-four states had instituted some form of compulsory temperance education. Yet many school officials still resisted STI, maligning
it as "a piece of weak sentimentality" that usurped local prerogative.
"School examiners, school boards and school superintendents are, many
of them, indifferent to the law-ignore it-and are not dismissed," an
Ohio STI worker complained. But "no law will enforce itself," she added.
" Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 17801860 (New York, 1983), chs. 6-7; Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State:
The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cambridge, Mass.,
1982); Tyack et al., Law and the Shaping of Public Education, ch. 2, esp. 57-59; Tyack
and Hansot, Managers of Virtue, pt. 1; Wayne E. Fuller, The Old Country School: The
Story of Rural Education in the Middle West (Chicago, 1982), chs. 5-8.
12 Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 115; Robert Wiebe, "The Social Functions of Public
Education," American Quarterly 21 (Summer 1969): 149.
13Mary H. Hunt, "Scientific Temperance Instruction," Union Signal, 15 Mar. 1883.
"The Queen of the Lobby"
9
Fulfillment would demand the perpetual vigilance of STI superintendents,
who continued to cajole stubborn schoolmen. "It is amusing when girls
of some local unions go to the superintendents of schools," wrote a
Virginia woman, "and when these worthies will not come to terms, to
hear these girls say, 'But no matter what you think, the code of Virginia
requires you to teach it.' " To prepare local STI workers for these negotiations, WCTUs across the country sponsored "mock school boards"
where the state STI superintendent (or Hunt, if she could attend) fielded
questions from women masquerading as irate board members. Additional
advice came from Hunt's plans and editorials in the Union Signal, the
WCTU's national organ. To sway a school official, "do not go prancing
up to his gates on your hobby horse, aggressively demanding admittance,"
the Signal warned. "Remember also the exceeding sensitiveness [sic] to
their own dignity which comes with a 'little brief authority.' The average
school director is enveloped in it.... You must study your men. What
will have great weight with one will have little with another."'4
Most importantly, Hunt urged, local superintendents must visit the
schools in their districts to observe STI lessons, examinations, recitations,
and textbooks. "It is our duty not to take the word of some school
official," Hunt wrote, "but to visit the school and carefully and wisely
ascertain for ourselves if the study is faithfully pursued by all pupils."
In each of the twenty-three towns in Massachusetts's Hampshire County,
for example, a woman selected by the local WCTU monitored the schools
and reported to county STI superintendent H. A. Orcutt. Orcutt's 1889
records reveal that these local agents collected information on 292
schools, noting for each town the total number and grade level of students
receiving STI, the nature of examinations, and the type of textbook (if
any) in use. In regions too remote to support a WCTU, the state STI
superintendent often recruited a local woman to inspect the schools: 30
such agents served in Maine, yielding a state total of 128 local superintendents even though Maine had only 98 WCTUs. By 1898, Pennsylvania would boast 774 superintendents, the largest statewide total;
Wisconsin, meanwhile, won the distinction for the most new agents enlisted in that year, 34.'5
14 "Will Hygiene Be Taught in the Public Schools? Brooklyn Eagle (1884?), frame 177,
roll 8, STF Series; Hannah A. Foster, "Ohio: Persistent, Progressive Efforts," Union Signal,
25 June 1891; T. P. Bagby, "Scientific Temperance Instruction in Virginia," Union Signal,
2 May 1901; Mary E. Newton, "Scientific Temperance Instruction," Union Signal, 16 Apr.
1891; Anna M. Greene, "Pennsylvania: State Notes and Scientific Institutes," Union Signal,
28 May 1891; Sunday News (Detroit), 3 May 1891, frame 360, roll 18, STF Series;
"Difficulties, and How to Overcome Them," Union Signal, 25 June 1891.
Is Mary H. Hunt, "Scientific Temperance Instruction," Union Signal, 9 Jan. 1890;
Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Pathfinder, 19-21; Hunt, History of Scientific
Temperance Instruction, 58, 53.
History of Education Quarterly
10
:::
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::?. ::
:
::
:
:
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X
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:::-:::-
'Correspondenlce Room" in Mary Hunt's Boston home, which also served as the national
headquarters for the Scientific Temperlancemovement. From Mary H. Hunt, An Epoch of
the Nineteenth Centutry(Boston, 1897), 47. (Courtesyof the Library of Congress, Washington,
).(C.
The "Scientific TemnperanceMuseum," also part of Mary Hunt's national headquarters,
featured WC1Ui-sponsored textbooks, copites of state STI laws, antdpens that governors
had used to sign these me.asures. From Hunt, lEpochof Nineteenth Centturyv27. Courtesy
of the Library of Congress.
"The Queen of the Lobby"
11
Within many of the schools that these women visited, a different
bureaucratic transformation was under way. Enjoying greater influence
than their counterparts atop state systems, city school superintendents
had devised standardized structures-grade divisions, sequential curricula, and uniform examinations-to classify students and teachers along
a single spectrum. In the same spirit, meanwhile, new draconian codes
of behavior required students quite literally to toe the line. "The pupil
must have his lessons ready at the appointed time, must rise at the tap
of the bell, move to the line, return; in short, go through all the evolutions
with equal precision," wrote William T. Harris, chief publicist for these
innovations. Finally, local school boards issued complex employee regulations, including a "delineation of duties" for each position. Yet nascent
school bureaucracies were hounded from infancy by a nagging antibureaucratic critique, which skewered the very standardization that Harris celebrated. In Massachusetts, for example, Charles Francis Adams,
Jr., and other opponents likened the new school systems to prisons and
their advocates to "drill sergeants," whose rigid rules and dictatorial
demeanor insulated schools from lay control. As Michael B. Katz has
shown, patrician critics like Adams pinned their hopes for reform on
their own personal initiative-on "charisma," the Weberian antithesis of
bureaucracy. A quixotic St. George confronts the bureaucratic dragon;
but in Katz's saga, the dragon slays St. George. Thereafter, it rebuffs
every challenger in its path. "As the organization of urban education
became more complex," Katz concludes, "laymen had progressively less
power to influence school policy."'6
Yet STI laymen-or laywomen, we should say-could influence
school policy, by mimicking the multi-tiered structure that the schoolmen
sought to impose. Like Katz, Hunt recognized that charisma alone could
never check bureaucracy. Only bureaucracy could check bureaucracy.
Yet STI and the "One Best System" of schools embodied different types
of bureaucracy. Scientific Temperance's success sprang not just from its
comprehensive structure but from its decentralized mode of operation.
Vesting authority in each superintendent rather than in the "National
Office," STI fostered an internal democracy that belied contemporary
16
Tyack et al., Law and the Shaping of Public Education, 61; Wiebe, "The Social
Functions of Public Education," 157ff.; Tyack, The One Best System, 43; idem, "Bureaucracy and the Common School: The Example of Portland, Oregon, 1851-1913," American
Quarterly 19 (Fall 1967): 487-88, 475-76; Max Weber, "The Sociology of Charismatic
Authority" in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C.
Wright Mills (New York, 1981; orig. 1946), esp. 246; Michael B. Katz, Class, Bureaucracy,
and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America, 2d ed. (New York, 1975),
103.
History of Education Quarterly
12
paeans to Hunt's "army."'7 But it worked. In the ensuing battle surrounding Progressive education, a movement of experts devoted to curbing "lay influence" in schools, STI's women warriors would continue to
hold down the fort-and to wield "influence," against all odds, in American schools.
s: ;*
,;
;
;
"I should as soon think of talking about the democratization of the
treatment of appendicitis [as] the democratization of schools." At the
podium stood Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University
and perhaps the most prominent spokesman for "Progressive" reform in
educational administration. "The fundamental confusion is this: Democracy is a principle of government; the schools belong to the administration; and a democracy is as much entitled as a monarchy to have its
business well done." The Merchant's Club of Chicago, Butler's audience
at this 1906 affair, burst into applause. A decade earlier, he had spearheaded the successful drive to replace New York City's ward-based school
trustees with a citywide board of mayoral appointees. Across urban
America, a similar pattern of centralization emerged. Legislatures vested
authority in small, cross-city boards, which selected superintendents to
command streamlined new school systems. Quickly, the boards became
blue-blood bastions. The new five-member Boston School Board boasted
five "Harvard men"-a far cry from the riff-raff that had served previously, as a gleeful Charles W. Eliot noted. Yet the boards granted wide
discretion and autonomy to their superintendents, who represented a
new breed as well. Animated by a generic Protestantism that fused the
American Republic to the Kingdom of God, earlier school leaders had
spanned the nascent nation to promote common schools in His name.
Progressive superintendents, by contrast, emulated engineers rather than
evangelists; their watchwords were science and efficiency, not Scripture
and enlightenment.l'
17 Both Hunt's supporters and her adversaries used military metaphors to describe her
organization. See, for example, W. B. Ferguson, "Temperance Teaching and Recent Legislation in Connecticut," Report of the Commissioner of Education, 1900-01 (Washington,
D.C., 1902), 1037; "Scientific Temperance Instruction in the Public Schools," Report of
the Commissioner of Education, 1889-90 (Washington, D.C., 1891), 696.
18 Chicago Merchants' Club, Public Schools and Their Administration: Addresses Delivered at the Fifty-Ninth Meeting of the Merchants' Club of Chicago (Chicago, 1906), 40,
quoted in Tyack, One Best System, 77; Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: New York
City, 1805-1973 (New York, 1974), 107-58; Sol Cohen, Progressives and Urban School
Reform: The Public Education Association of New York City, 1895-1954 (New York,
1964), chs. 1-2; David Tyack, "City Schools: Centralization of Control at the Turn of the
Century," in Building the Organizational Society: Essays on Associational Activities in
Modern America, ed. Jerry Israel (New York, 1972), 58; Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic;
Tyack and Hansot, Managers of Virtue.
"TheQueen of the Lobby"
13
These new superintendents retained the millennial optimism-the
"moral earnestness and sense of mission"-of their predecessors. Yet
they rejected the older vision of redemption via democratic participation.
Progressive reformers outside the schools would struggle to reconcile this
democratic ideal with government by experts, the pivot of their new
bureaucratic politics. They seized upon interest groups, which would
represent citizens indirectly via new functional units-and would coordinate with credentialed, professional administrators to construct a frictionless utopia. "These were the years," concludes Richard McCormick,
"when governments at every level began to take explicit account of clashing interests and to assume the responsibility for adjusting them through
regulation, administration, and planning."'9
Schools were the great exception. Educational reformers displayed
the same devotion to expertise, of course-but without the corresponding
commitment to group participation. Attacked as undemocratic, nervous
Progressives in other municipal realms proclaimed a new harmony of
science and society; but schoolmen like Butler pleaded guilty as charged,
exulting in the unabashed elitism of their project. "The leaders of the
intellectual life of the city will have to evolve a plan," wrote Andrew S.
Draper, superintendent of several school systems, "and the masses will
have to be educated to its support." Other Progressives, following
McCormick's prescription, might speak of "formally recognizing and
adjusting group differences" among segments of the population; schoolmen would speak only of winning their compliance. Policy itself was
usually pre-ordained by a tiny, inbred network of academics, foundation
researchers, and superintendents that placed friends and students in offices, shaped state and federal legislation, and otherwise dominated American schools for the next half-century.2"This "Educational Trust" did
not lack critics, of course; teacher leaders like Margaret Haley blasted
its hierarchical organizational reforms, while dissident theorists like John
Dewey and George Counts denounced the Trust's mechanical, formalistic
curricula. Yet even radicals who opposed the Trust's "undemocratic"
style of educational policy seemed to support-or at least accept-its
undemocratic style of educational policy-making.2'
19Tyack and Hansot, Managers of Virtue, 3; John Higham, "Hanging Together: Divergent Unities in American History," Journal of American History 61 (June 1974): 24,
15; Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, 1967), 159-63; Richard
L. McCormick, From Realignment to Reform: Political Change in New York State, 18931910 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981), 255.
20 Wiebe, Search for Order, 161; Andrew S. Draper, "Common Schools in the Larger
Cities," Forum 27 (June 1899): 385-97, quoted in Tyack, One Best System, 130; McCormick, From Realignment to Reform, 255; Tyack and Hansot, Managers of Virtue,
129-67.
21 Tyack and Hansot, Managers of Virtue, 204.
14
History of Education Quarterly
Several historians have recently sought to revise this insular image,
claiming that a broad range of American citizens influenced school politics. Paul E. Peterson argues that foreign languages, vocational education,
and other curricular changes represented attempts by public schools to
compete with private institutions that already offered such novelties. Yet
this "organizational imperative" reflects only the most indirect form of
citizen "influence." Dissenting groups in Peterson's account did not organize large, permanent efforts to affect public schools, but instead withdrew into private enclaves. Decisions remained firmly in the hands of
schoolmen, who clearly sought to lure dissenters but rarely faced serious
challenges from them. In another pluralist account, William J. Reese
depicts schools as "contested terrain" where business-backed bureaucrats
faced off against "grass-roots, community-oriented" groups like parent
associations. Rejecting the rigid, standardized formalism of Harris and
other "administrative progressives," these citizens were instrumental in
catapulting a new generation of schoolmen into power. Yet, thereafter,
a "cooperative spirit" pervaded local activists, who routinely deferred to
the school professionals they had anointed.22
Against this backdrop of expert hegemony, Scientific Temperance
represented a stark aberration: an informed, involved "lay polity" that
took on the Educational Trust-and won. But in the context of Progressive Era politics in general, STI represented an even greater aberration. At a time when successful private interest groups and public agencies
(like urban schools) increasingly emulated "business principles" of corporate consolidation, STI retained a democratic, federated operation. The
corporate model vested authority in a central office, which coordinated
and directed all subordinate units; but STI's federated model allowed
these units to retain their autonomy, granting central leaders advisory
powers only. This federated system was no less "bureaucratic" than the
corporate framework. Instead, it was a different kind of bureaucracy,
patterned after nineteenth-century public institutions rather than twentieth-century private ones. Like the Progressives they chronicle, however,
historians have been seduced by the "business model." Too blithely, they
have assumed that all bureaucracies required corporate-type consolidation to achieve "efficiency" and "innovation"; otherwise they perish,
22 Paul E. Peterson, The Politics of School Reform, 1870-1940
(Chicago, 1985), ch.
3; William J. Reese, Power and the Promise of School Reform: Grassroots Movements
during the Progressive Era (Boston, 1986), xx, xxii; idem, "Between Home and School:
Organized Parents, Clubwomen, and Urban Education in the Progressive Era," School
Review 87 (Nov. 1978): 17. See also Steven Schlossman, "Before Home Start: Notes toward
a History of Parent Education in America, 1897-1929," Harvard Educational Review 46
(Aug. 1976): 436-67.
"TheQueen of the Lobby"
15
consigned to the dustheap of organizational history. Yet STI shows that
there was more than one road to bureaucratic bliss. It did not follow
Robert Michels's allegedly "iron law of oligarchy," which claimed that
even the most democratically spirited organizations will develop strict
hierarchies-and will concentrate control at the top-in pursuit of their
objectives. Without consolidating, STI blazed a wide trail across the
American polity. Without sacrificing democracy, it achieved efficiency.23
The loose, federated design of the Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction paralleled STI's parent, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. The women who framed the first WCTU constitution in
1874 explicitly structured it "after the manner of our national political
divisions." Each county president would serve as a vice-president of her
district society, each district president as a vice-president of the state
society, and each state president as a vice-president of the national
WCTU. (In 1884, WCTU president Frances Willard would call on county
societies to divide into local unions-"the only missing link in following
out the political subdivisions that men have found convenient and desirable.") Together with the national officers, the state presidents would
comprise the "executive committee" of the WCTU's annual convention,
where each state was represented by a delegation varying in size according
to its seats in Congress. Later, the Union would alter this system to make
each delegation proportional to the paid WCTU membership in the state.
Nevertheless, the WCTU retained and even broadened its territorial structure, consciously mimicking male political institutions as well as male
political "subdivisions," "The strength of the great parties is the perfection of their organization," proclaimed Willard. "The power of our gov-
23 Mayer Zald and Michael Berger, "Social Movements in Organizations: Coup d'Etat,
Insurgency, and Mass Movements," American Journal of Sociology 83 (Jan. 1978): 83033; Louis Galambos, America at Middle Age: A New History of the U.S. in the Twentieth
Century (New York, 1983); idem, "By Way of Introduction," in The New American State:
Bureaucraciesand Policies since World War II, ed. Louis Galambos (Baltimore, Md., 1987),
8. On "business principles" in education, see Raymond Callahan, Education and the Cult
of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces That Have Shaped the Administration of the
Public Schools (Chicago, 1962); Barbara Berman, "Business Efficiency, American Schooling, and the Public School Superintendency: A Reconsideration of the Callahan Thesis,"
History of Education Quarterly 23 (Fall 1983): 297-321. Relevant critiques of Michels's
"iron law of oligarchy" include: Peter M. Blau, Bureaucracy in Modern Society (New York,
1956), 93ff.; Alvin Gouldner, "Metaphysical Pathos and the Theory of Bureaucracy,"
American Political Science Review 49 (June 1955): 496-507. Studies of other protest
organizations suggest that the federated structure was not particular to educational reform
groups. See, for example, Michael Schwartz, Naomi Rosenthal, and Laura Schwartz,
"Leader-Member Conflict in Protest Organizations: The Case of the Southern Farmers'
Alliance," Social Problems 29 (Spring 1981): 22-36. But see also Grant McConnell, Private
Power and American Democracy (New York, 1966), chs. 4-5.
16
Historyof EducationQuarterly
ernment is in the fact that from school district to Commonwealth it is
mapped, grouped, and officered" [italics added].24
Yet like political parties, the WCTU would establish functional as
well as geographical offices to pursue its multifarious goals.25 "This is
the age of experts and specialists," Willard declared in her 1880 presidential address. "We must find out what each woman who makes this
cause her life-work can do best, then set her at that and see that she is
taken care of." The convention proceeded to create twenty-one functional
departments-including Scientific Temperance Instruction-and to elect
superintendents, who were empowered "to originate, to advise and to
direct plans of work relating to their several departments." Like all
WCTU plans and policies, however, this organizational overhaul remained purely optional-never obligatory-at auxiliary levels. Each
state, district, county, and local union retained the right to choose which
nationally devised departments it would add to its own structure. Similarly, functional superintendents at each level-like presidents and other
officers-would be selected by the auxiliary unions themselves, not by
their departmental "superiors."26
Yet in practice, as we saw in the case of STI, superintendents were
often recruited via departmental hierarchies. "No State Superintendent
fulfills her whole duty unless she uses her best efforts to secure, in each
county, a County Superintendent of her Department with whom she can
work in harmony," a WCTU handbook admonished. "No County Superintendent fulfills her official obligations unless she steadily labors to
secure in each local Union a Superintendent of her Department with
whom she is in constant cooperation."27 Moreover, national plans instructed superintendents to heed departmental leaders outside their aux-
24 Minutes
of the First Convention of the National Woman's Christian Temperance
Union (Chicago, 1874), 32; Mary H. Hunt, "The Call for a New Army," School Physiology
Journal 7 (Mar. 1898): 129; Bordin, Woman and Temperance, 26-27, 39; Frances Willard,
Woman and Temperance; or, the Work and Works of the Woman's Christian Temperance
Union (New York, 1972; orig. 1883), 160-63; New York State Woman's Christian Temperance Union, W.C.T.U. Handbook, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1890), 4; Minutes of the Eleventh
Convention of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union (Chicago, 1884), 62;
Minutes of the Sixth Convention of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union
(Cleveland, 1879), 65; Minutes of the Ninth Convention of the National Woman's Christian
Temperance Union (Brooklyn, 1882), lxxxiii-lxxiv.
25 On the rise of party bureaucracies, see Lynn L. Marshall, "The Strange Stillbirth of
the Whig Party," American Historical Review 72 (Jan. 1967): esp. 450.
26 Minutes of the Seventh Convention of the National Woman's Christian Temperance
Union (New York, 1880), 96-97; Minutes of the Twelfth Convention of the National
Woman's Christian Temperance Union (Brooklyn, 1885), 139, 142; New York W.C.T.U.,
W.C.T.U. Handbook, 17. See also Bordin, Woman and Temperance, esp. 97.
27 New York
W.C.T.U., W.T.C.U. Handbook, 75, 65-66.
"The Queen of the Lobby"
17
iliary unions rather than divisional leaders within them.28Theoretically,
then, a superintendent was caught in the classic bureaucratic bind of
multiple masters: whereas functional superiors enlisted and instructed
her, regional chapters confirmed her appointment and could veto her
actions. Yet the absence of "clear lines of authority"-the hallmark of
corporate-model bureaucracies-proved far more of a boon than a burden. It helped enhance STI morale and motivation. It helps explain STI
strength and survival.
Here STI invites comparison with the Anti-Saloon League, the
WCTU's stepson and the key organizational dynamo behind national
prohibition. According to K. Austin Kerr, the ASL borrowed its nonpartisan strategy from the WCTU wing that opposed endorsement of the
Prohibition party. (Hunt was a prominent spokeswoman for this wing,
fearing that "the bitterness of political partisan differences" would stem
STI's legislative successes.) Yet the ASL grafted a new corporate structure
onto this old strategy, mimicking the "business model" of the modern
firm by centralizing authority in a national office. A tight ring of managers
formulated all major ASL policy, including the selection of state superintendents-who were moved like chessmen across the country, as the
managers saw fit. "It is certain that any real influence from the rank and
file is not within the contemplation of the League," wrote Peter Odegard,
a contemporary observer. "To allow complete democracy would destroy
the unity of purpose necessary, dissipate leadership and prevent quick,
effective action. Much fruitless dissension is avoided by centralized control, and the League sacrifices democracy for effective leadership." Yet
STI achieved "effective action" without sacrificing democracy. Its loose,
federated structure lent it the range and flexibility to enforce its willeven in the face of a powerful assault from the Educational Trust.29
Like scientists who savaged Hunt and her "fanatical followers" for
teaching inaccuracies about alcohol, educators grounded their critique
of STI in the bedrock of Progressive authority: credentialed knowledge.30
28 See, for example, E. G. Greene, Pathfinder for the Organization and Work of the
Woman's Christian Temperance Union (New York, 1884), 39, 41.
29 K. Austin Kerr, Organized for Prohibition: A New History of the Anti-Saloon League
(New Haven, Conn., 1985), 73, 54-57, 80-82; Mary H. Hunt (hereafter MHH) to Mary
Lovell, 12 Aug. 1886, frame 568-69, roll 14, STF Series; K. Austin Kerr, "Organizing for
Reform: The Anti-Saloon League and Innovation in Politics," American Quarterly 32
(Spring 1980): 37-54; Timberlake, Prohibition and the Progressive Movement, 133; Peter
Odegard, Pressure Politics: The Story of the Anti-Saloon League (New York, 1928),
15-16.
30 At the root of STl's dispute with scientists lay the question of whether alcohol should
be classed as "food" or "poison." Hunt and her allies acknowledged laboratory evidence
that the body oxidizes alcohol like other foods-but continued to insist that the addictive
18
Historyof EducationQuarterly
Earlier schoolmen had phrased their objections in the language of localism, skewering STI laws as egregious encroachments upon community
control. As in most nineteenth-century school controversies, the dispute
had centered around the proper level of democratic rule: state, local, or
somewhere in between. Progressive educators, by contrast, derided any
democratic rule-at least in curricular questions that were best left to
experts. "If my child had scarlet fever, it would be the height of folly for
me to call in a physician and demand that he cure him by the use of cod
liver oil," a Massachusetts superintendent complained. "Those who have
had little or no experience in dealing with children and who have studied
neither pedagogy nor psychology should be content to leave the details
and the method of achieving the desired result to those who have."3'
At the heart of both these disciplines lay the new "child-study"
movement, STI's key academic antagonist. Rejecting William T. Harris's
emphasis upon uniform sequence, "child-study" stressed the natural virtues and especially the natural development of the individual student.
Like the "muscular Christianity" that was sweeping American colleges,
however, child-study celebrated a particular set of "manly" virtuesstrength, energy, and courage-that schools had supposedly stifled by
harping upon sin.32Scientific Temperance epitomized this error, a school
superintendent wrote, because it appeals "chiefly to fear" rather than
"to manliness and the moral nature" within each child. "The trembling
hand, the thick speech, the dull senses, the poisoned blood.. . the poverty,
crime, and misery of the drunkard are hysterically held up to the gaze
of the children," he complained, "but the steady hand, the distinct speech,
the quick senses ... the success and happiness of the temperate man are
scarcely mentioned." In the worst case, educators claimed, this perversion
provoked students' curiosity-and promoted intemperance. Usually,
however, STI's tedium, monotony, and "slavish adherence to text-books"
suppressed "manly" inquisitiveness-which was almost as bad.33
potential of liquor justified the appellation "poison." Harry G. Levine, "The Committee
of Fifty and the Origins of Alcohol Control," Journal of Drug Issues 13 (Winter 1983):
95-116; Philip J. Pauly, "The Struggle for Ignorance about Alcohol: American Physiologists, Wilbur Olin Atwater, and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union," Bulletin of
the History of Medicine 64 (Winter 1990): 366-92; John J. Rumbarger, Profits, Power,
and Prohibition: Alcohol Reform and the Industrializing of America, 1800-1930 (Albany,
N.Y., 1989), ch. 6.
31F. C. Atwell to R. H. Magwood, 5 Apr. 1904, frames 739-42, roll 12, STF Series.
32 Herbert Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958 (London,
1986), 41-51; Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York,
1963), ch. 14; Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present
(New York, 1977), ch. 7.
33Ferguson, "Temperance Teaching in Connecticut," 1036; Argus (Albany), 1 Aug.
1895, frame 213, roll 10, STF Series. In arguing that "the educational profession as a
whole was sympathetic" to Scientific Temperance, STI's most recent historians conflate
"old" Progressive educators (like Harris) who supported STI and "new" child-study Progressives who skewered it. Tyack et al., Law and the Shaping of Public Education, 158.
"The Queen of the Lobby"
19
Never one to shun battle, Hunt tried to parry each thrust of this
new Progressive pedagogy. We simply must teach the dangers of alcohol,
she insisted, for the same reasons that we must tell a boy paddling on
the Niagara River about the falls that lurk below: otherwise, he may not
know that death awaits him. Would he be bored? Not if teachers followed
the graded curriculum and the STI recommendation of three lessons per
week for fourteen weeks. If the forty-odd lessons that most state laws
required are spread out across the school year, Hunt wrote, "the pupil's
interest is not so well sustained, nor proficiency so easily acquired." Yet
this was as much as Hunt would concede to child-study theorists promoting "interest" over "subject." Quoting a sympathetic state legislator,
Hunt emphasized that "children do not always want to do what we know
they ought to do." They ought to learn the hazards of drink; and we
must ensure that they do so, interested or not. Herein lay the value of
textbooks, the indispensable guarantor of STI. Without standardized
texts, Hunt argued, teachers would fail to present the appropriate material.34
Yet without teacher cooperation, no text-indeed, no law-would
make a difference. Convinced that teachers had been "prejudiced" by
child-study propaganda, STI workers streamed back into the schools to
"win the school ma'ams."35They also organized parlor meetings, receptions, and teas where STI workers and instructors could socialize in more
informal settings. Hunt's plans counseled caution during such contacts,
when the slightest condescension might sway teachers in the wrong direction. "Theoretically, of course, any one has a right to visit the schools
and find out what work is being done," Hunt wrote, "but as you know,
there are a great many different ways of doing this and each union should
send its most able woman." Ultimately, the fate of STI-and of the nation,
in Hunt's view-rested upon the tact and tenacity of these individual
volunteers. Invoking a military metaphor that more accurately captured
the nature of her organization, Hunt repeatedly emphasized that the
national office could offer only general, hortatory "ammunition" to STI
workers; for in the heat of combat, the soldier on the field remained the
best judge of strategy. "It is very difficult to advise exactly what course
34Mary H. Hunt, "Is It a Moral or a Scientific Question, or Both?" School Physiology
Journal 5 (Dec. 1895): 50; Hunt, History of Scientific Temperance Instruction, 41; Mary
H. Hunt, "Temperance Instruction in the Lower Grades," School Physiology Journal 5
(Oct. 1895): 18; Mary H. Hunt, An Epoch of the Nineteenth Century: An Outline of the
Work for Scientific Temperance Education in the Public Schools of the United States
(Boston, 1897), 28; Mary H. Hunt, "How the Twentieth Century May Bring Emancipation
from Alcohol," School Physiology Journal 14 (May 1905): 131.
3S "On Duty," "The Watch-Tower," Union Signal, 6 Feb. 1890.
20
History of Education Quarterly
to pursue without knowing the persons with whom you have to deal,"
she wrote apologetically to a local STI worker in Illinois, who had sought
assistance in enforcing the law in her school. "Methods have to be
adapted to " 'temperament.' " The same principle applied to negotiations
with state school boards, textbook committees, and even other members
of the WCTU. "Not knowing your state thoroughly, I can not say of
course whether it would be better for you to work directly through the
district or county [WCTU] superintendents," Hunt told the Nebraska
state superintendent. "Someone who is familiar with the conditions can
probably advise you on this point better than I."36
Yet across America-even, increasingly, in rural school systemsSTI women could expect to provoke the ire of newly minted educational
experts.37"The effort of these reforming women ... is interfering with
what is none of their business," wrote one Connecticut critic, "and establishes a dangerous precedent which we are attempting to throw out
of our political system, and which we ought not to allow to be introduced
into our educational system." That precedent, of course, was democratic
participation. As party commitment and other forms of political activity
plummeted, STI women found themselves paddling against the corporate
current-and gaining new insight into its strength and sources. In democratic movements, Lawrence Goodwyn has written, people struggling
against one aspect of "the received hierarchical order" discover "a number of exploitative qualities about that hierarchy that they did not previously grasp." Struggling against new educational experts, STI workers
came to realize-and reject-the new credentialed bases of Progressive
power. In Utica, New York, Mary E. Tallman marched into the office
of "school superintendent George Griffith, P.H.D. [sic]," and ridiculed
his naive child-study predilection for teaching "good" rather than "evil."
If the superintendent were strolling with his son and chanced to encounter
a drunk, Tallman asked, wouldn't he warn the child? Educators "dislike
very much being interfered with in there [sic] elaboration of an educational system," wrote Mrs. E. 0. Orr from tiny West Galaway, New
York. "None of [them] have taken very kindly to the new departure of
being watched, questioned or advised by their constituents."38
36 MHH to G. E. Deuel, 25 Sep. 1901, frames 50-53, roll 7, MHH to S. S. Rodocker,
14 Nov. 1899, frames 752-54, roll 6, and MHH to Elizabeth Thomas, 15 Nov. 1901,
frames 714-15, roll 7, STF Series.
37As David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot have noted, small-town superintendents during this era often "acquired new ideas about education in their training and in their
professional associations" and "became carriers of an adopted cosmopolitanism." Tyack
and Hansot, Managers of Virtue, 178.
38 Clipping, Hartford Post, 18 May 1893, frame 426, roll 8, STF Series; Lawrence
Goodwyn, "Organizing Democracy: The Limits of Theory and Practice," Democracy 1
(Jan. 1981): 48; Mary E. Tallmann to MHH, 6 Feb. 1902, frame 65, roll 12, and E. 0.
Orr to MHH, [1902?], frame 383, roll 12, STF Series.
"TheQueen of the Lobby"
21
Yet this "new departure" owed much to the older tradition of popular politics. Indeed, STI retained both the decentralized structure and
the "intense, dogmatic cast of mind" (a tendency "to imagine a blackand-white world of absolutes") that had characterized Gilded Age political parties. Michael McGerr has maintained that the "spectacular"
style of nineteenth-century parties re-emerged within the women's suffrage campaigns of the early twentieth century, yielding the same "sense
of power" and communal participation for women that political parties
had provided for men. Here his argument mirrors Goodwyn's masterful
evocation of Populist rituals, like mass encampments and wagon trains,
which "fulfilled the democratic promise" by allowing people "to 'see
themselves' experimenting in new democratic forms." Born of history's
impassioned but occasionally impetuous romance with anthropology,
neither interpretation indicates whether these rituals of power bore any
demonstrable relation to the actual exertion of power-"the chance of
a man or of a number of men[sic] to realize their own will in a communal
action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the
action," in Max Weber's venerable parlance. STI women did not engage
in the "public rituals of solidarity and power" that distinguished nineteenth-century partisans and twentieth-century suffragists; instead, they
engaged in power itself, realizing their own will even against the resistance
of powerful men. A continuous and often contentious engagement with
legislators, school board members, and finally educational experts allowed STI women to "see themselves" actually affecting democracynot just "experimenting" in it.39
Yet the experts could take comfort in the prescient prediction that
history was on their side. "The twentieth century," wrote one schoolman,
will doubtless witness marvelous progress in many lines of effort. That
progress will be made, as progress always has been made, through
intense thought and study rather than through mere sentiment and
feeling. I do not undervalue the work sometimes accomplished by
enthusiasts . . . but they need to be directed and controlled, else they
are like wild engines, whose speed is dangerous and whose destination
is uncertain. Clear-headed, practical men and women must direct any
reform, if the results are to be beneficial and lasting.4"
39Michael McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928
(New York, 1986), 13, 14, 217; idem, "Political Style and Women's Power, 1830-1930,"
Journal of American History 77 (Dec. 1990): 865; Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist
Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York, 1978), 296; Max
Weber, "Class, Status, and Party" in From Max Weber, ed. Gerth and Mills, 180.
40 W. B. Ferguson, "Scientific Temperance in Connecticut," Journal of Education, 13
June 1901, frame 712, roll 14, STF Series.
22
History of Education Quarterly
Since then, "practical men and women-a small network of professionals-have indeed "directed and controlled" public education in the
United States. Educators of all stripes continued to resist "lay influence"
on schools during the 1930s, when a new ideological revival swept America and a new President gave his imprimatur to interest-group politics.41
Even in the 1950s and 1960s, when civil-rights activists and other fledgling citizen groups swaggered into the educational arena, their demands
often spawned "more complex and fragmented bureaucracies" rather
than more responsive schools, as David Tyack has noted. Nowhere was
this clearer than in curricular questions, where "the politics of expertise
loom ever larger" now that a host of federal and state experts have joined
local professionals in determining what children learn.42But the resultsfor our schools, for our society, for ourselves-have been less than beneficial. In delegating educational policy to experts, we discard our main
chance to deliberate the values we wish to bequeath to our young. Americans instinctively recoil at such a task, fearing that popularly determined
curricula might erode important civil liberties. "Collective action can be
monstrous," Stephen Holmes reminds us, "and 'group aims' may include
genocide." How, then, are we to reconcile virtue and liberty, our desire
to privilege certain ideas as "good" but also to preserve the "free mind"
of the individual?43Comparing Scientific Temperance to its notorious
descendant, the anti-evolution movement, we may hazard an answer.
"What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the
community want for all of its children." So began John Dewey's The
School and Society, the first and perhaps most famous synopsis of Dewey's educational philosophy. Rejecting the arcane formalism of "subject"based study as well as the naive romanticism of purely "child-centered"
curricula, Dewey insisted that the school could transcend this dualism
(indeed, all dualisms) by transforming itself-into "a miniature community, an embryonic society." Here children would receive what Dewey
41Tyack and Hansot, Managers of Virtue, 204; Higham, "Hanging Together," 27;
Ellis Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence (Princeton, N.J., 1966).
42 David Tyack, " 'Restructuring' in Historical Perspective: Tinkering toward Utopia,"
Teachers College Record 92 (Winter 1990): 179; William Boyd, "The Changing Politics
of Curricular Policy-Making for American Schools," Review of Educational Research 48
(Fall 1978): 612. For a contrasting view, see Paul E. Peterson, "The Politics of Education,"
Review of Research in Education 2 (1974): 348-89.
43 Stephen Holmes, "The Community Trap," New Republic, 28 Nov. 1988, 26; Amy
Gutmann, "Democratic Education in Difficult Times," Teachers College Record 92 (Fall
1990): 7-20.
"The Queen of the Lobby"
23
called an education for "social progress," the skills and resources to meet
the changing circumstances of a changing world. "Any other ideal for
our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy," Dewey declared.44
Yet how can we be certain that "the community" (wherever and
whatever that is) "must" desire such an ideal? As Amy Gutmann has
recently argued, Dewey's creed of democratic education hinged upon a
fundamentally undemocratic premise: that schools must privilege a preestablished set of values ("what the best and wisest parent wants"),
regardless of the popular will. Dewey's writings are peppered with paeans
to citizen participation, which he termed the "keynote of democracy."
Yet the very cradle of participatory democracy, the school, would contradict this principle by excluding "outside" democratic participation.
The public, in Dewey's scheme, would not deliberate the content or
contours of his "embryonic society"; instead, the embryonic societylike the egg before the chicken-would hatch a deliberative public.45
all
Liberal pretenses notwithstanding, all curricula-indeed,
schools-privilege some values over others. Why democratic deliberation? Following Gutmann, let us consider the alternatives. The Platonic
solution-to teach children a unitary ideal or Truth, as gleaned by philosopher-kings-does not help us identify who has ascended to this exalted throne. Dewey? Bloom? Hirsch? Giroux?46Even if we could agree
on a moral exemplar, moreover, we could not impose his or her regime
except at great moral costs. Absolute truth yields absolute repression
(exile from Athens, as Plato foresaw) for the unenlightened, violating
their freedom to choose alternatives. By contrast, the Millsian or liberal
solution-teach
children autonomy, by maximizing their potential
choices and eschewing "bias" in schools-prizes this freedom above all,
regardless of whatever other virtues the community hopes to inculcate.
This solution does not deliver the "neutrality" it promises; no solution
does. But that is not the problem. The problem is that the liberal ideal-
44John Dewey, "The School and Society" [1900], in The Child and the Curriculum
and The School and Society (Chicago, 1956), 7, 18. See also Lawrence Cremin, The
Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New
York, 1961), 135-42.
4S Gutmann, Democratic Education, 13; Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics fora New Age (Berkeley, Calif., 1984), 139. See also Richard M. Battistoni,
Public Schooling and the Education of Democratic Citizens (Jackson, Miss., 1985), ch. 2.
46 For alternative-but equally undemocratic-formulations
of the Platonic Good in
education, see Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education
Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York, 1987);
E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Boston, 1987);
Henry A. Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition
(South Hadley, Mass., 1983).
24
Historyof EducationQuarterly
like the Platonic one-obliterates the tension between liberty and virtue.
Both schemas, in other words, pretend that we must select between them.
Either "we must educate children so that they are free to choose among
the widest range of lives because freedom of choice is the paramount
good, or we must educate children so that they will choose the life that
is best because a rightly ordered soul is the paramount good." Give us
liberty or give us virtue.4'
Democratic education, by contrast, accepts-indeed, celebratesthis central tension. Admittedly, we cannot maximize both liberty and
virtue. Yet we need not pick one or the other. Enter deliberation: only
a broad public debate will yield a consensual balance between our rightful
respect for individual freedoms and our equally rightful impulse to orient
individuals in the directions that we deem desirable. Yet this consensus,
like democracy itself, exists in time. So it changes over time, Robert Nash
reminds us, "as we change our minds about how best to describe human
beings and the world we inhabit." Since we cannot assume that today's
consensus will apply tomorrow, we must not restrict the capacity of
citizens to critique it. Thus we arrive at the key constraint upon deliberative democracy: it must not dissuade, prevent, or exclude citizens from
deliberating. The decisions that stem from our debate do not have to be
right. But they do have to be restrained, so that they do not squelch
future debates. "For every educational practice or institution," Gutmann
concludes, "we must therefore ask whether the practice or institution in
its actual context restricts (or impedes) rational inquiry" [italics added].48
We must, that is, look to history-"actual context"-to decide
whether democratically determined curricula inhibit the critical discussion that democracy demands. As its most recent historians have reminded us, Scientific Temperance represented only one of several popular
movements to alter the content of American public school education
during the last century.49In the 1920s, for example, a ferocious campaign
to prevent the teaching of evolution swept the nation. Groups like the
Bible Crusaders of America and the Flying Fundamentalists charged into
battle, introducing thirty-seven anti-evolution measures in twenty state
legislatures. Only five states passed such bills, but numerous local and
state school boards also banned Darwin-and bore witness to the or-
47Gutmann, "Democratic Education in Difficult Times," 11. See also idem, Democratic
Education, ch. 1.
48 Robert J. Nash, "A Communitarian View," in Robert S. Griffin and Robert J. Nash,
"Individualism, Community, and Education: An Exchange of Views," Educational Theory
40 (Winter 1990): 14; Gutmann, Democratic Education, 96, 11; idem, "Democratic Education in Difficult Times," 7, 17.
49Tyack et al., Law and the Shaping of Public Education, ch. 6.
"TheQueen of the Lobby"
25
ganizational sophistication of the anti-evolutionists, whose local chapters
mirrored STI in structure.50
Yet in substance-in the actual operation of the laws-anti-evolution
alone proved "repressive." By invoking this phrase, we are NOT invoking
the following well-known but ill-considered criticisms:
Anti-evolutionism reflected only a rural, "backwoods" segment of
public opinion. Although historians continue to mouth this canard, it is
almost surely wrong. It is also beside the point. Regardless of the movement's popularity outside of southern, rural areas, it clearly represented
a majority attitude within many of those areas. In Arkansas, the only
state submitting an anti-evolution law to popular referendum, the measure passed by almost a two-to-one margin. Indeed, majoritarianism
constituted a major strand of the anti-evolutionists' appeal. The people
pay the taxes, argued William Jennings Bryan; and "the hand that writes
the paycheck rules the school." Should it? The "backwoods" interpretation dodges the question of majoritarianism by denying the presence
of a majority.5'
Anti-evolutionism sprang from "religious" sentiment. Of course it
did. Divinely revealed religion, in fact, represented the other key thread
of the anti-Darwin argument. Evolution contradicted not just the will of
the people but the will of God-and eroded children's faith in Him.
Without the Fall from the Garden of Eden, proponents argued, there was
no sin; without sin, no salvation; without salvation, no god; and without
God, no Christianity. Yet it is absurd to term the movement repressive
solely because it derived "from religion." At some level, so did every key
precept and principle in American government-including the notion of
individual freedom, which liberals seek to insulate from the wrath of
"religious" ideas.52
Anti-evolutionism constrained teachers. All laws regarding curriculum-indeed, all laws regarding schools-"constrain" teachers, by limiting their discretion. Yet such limits do not constitute prima facie
schoolhouse "repression" any more than wide teacher discretion constitutes schoolhouse "democracy." Borrowing from studies of "workers'
control" in industrial settings, David Hogan has celebrated the brief
so Ibid., 166, 156; Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., ed., Controversy in the Twenties: Fundamentalism, Modernism, and Evolution (Nashville, Tenn., 1969), 36, 39, 246.
s1Dorothy Nelkin, The Creation Controversy: Science or Scripture in the Schools (New
York, 1982), 30; Gatewood, Controversy, 37-38, 319, 29; Paul A. Carter, Another Part
of the Twenties (New York, 1977), chs. 3-4; Woodbridge Riley, "The Fight against Evolution," Bookman 65 (May 1927): 289
52 Riley, "The Fight against Evolution," 288; Kenneth K. Bailey, Southern White Protestantism in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1964), 74; Theodore R. Sizer, Horace's
Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School. . . (Boston, 1984), 128-29.
26
Historyof EducationQuarterly
"democratic" period when Chicago teachers wrested authority from administrators.53Yet from a lay perspective, government by teachers' councils may be no more democratic than government by superintendents.54
In each case, school officials-not school patrons-retain control of policy decisions. By associating schools with factories, of course, historians
unwittingly mimic the very formulation for which they have skewered
Progressive Era "efficiency experts" who backed the notorious Gary Plan
and other "industrial" reforms. Unlike factory workers, however, teachers are paid in public monies to provide a public service. Hence a teacheroperated, internally democratic school might be externally undemocratic,
if the teachers' policies neglect the expressed desires of the citizenry.
Anti-evolutionism embodied ignorant prejudices. This view boasted
a distinguished literary pedigree, including the febrile fulminations of H.
L. Mencken and the wry aphorisms of Walter Lippmann.55Yet it also
enlisted academics like Yale President James R. Angell, who announced
that anti-evolution measures "could not be seriously entertained by any
really intelligent person." Nicholas Murray Butler, commenting on the
same laws, glumly noted that "educational curricula had been delivered
into the hands of the intellectually unfit."56Yet this neo-Platonist critique
begs the same questions that Plato did. Who shall determine truth and
falsity, knowledge and ignorance? Lippmann never wavered in his answer. "Guidance for a school can come ultimately only from educators,"
he wrote, "and the question of what shall be taught as biology can be
determined only by biologists. The votes of a majority do not settle
anything here and they are entitled to no respect whatever."57
The democratic theory of education, however, reverses Lippmann
by privileging "the votes of a majority"-unless these decisions hamper
critical discussion and debate. For our purposes, it is irrelevant whether
anti-evolutionism was rural, religious, restrictive upon teachers, or "in-
53 David Hogan, Class and Reform: School and Society in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Philadelphia, 1985), ch. 5; David Montgomery, Workers' Control in America: Studies in the
History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge, Eng., 1979).
S4 Indeed, "teachers' control" may be less democratic, because teachers receive less
public scrutiny-and less public pressure-than high-profile, mayoral- or board-appointed
superintendents experience.
5S In a column first published the day after Bryan's death, Mencken savaged Bryan's
anti-evolution supporters as "gaping primates," "a simian rabble," "yokels," "rustic ignoramuses," "the anthropoid rabble," "yahoos," and a "forlorn mob of imbeciles." H. L.
Mencken, "In Memoriam: W. J. B." in The Vintage Mencken, ed. Alistair Cooke (New
York, 1955), 163-67. See also Walter Lippmann, American Inquisitors: A Commentary
on Dayton and Chicago (New York, 1928).
56 Bailey, Southern White Protestantism, 76; Gatewood, Controversy, 286.
S7 Walter Lippmann, "Why Should the Majority Rule?" in The Essential Lippmann:
A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy, ed. Clinton Rossiter and James Lare (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 13.
"The Queen of the Lobby"
27
But none
tellectually unfit." It was all of the above, to varying degrees.x58
of these enumerated characteristics necessarily implies that anti-evolution
was intellectually repressive. Given the proper deliberative atmosphere,
even the instruction of patent mistruths can spawn critical inquiry.59Yet
in practice (in "actual context") anti-evolution smothered such inquirynot because it denied "truth" or came "from religion," but rather because
its explicitly religious rationale prevented skeptics from questioning truth.
Indeed, it branded such skeptics infidels. "The greatest menace to
the public school system today is . . . its Godlessness,"
Bryan declared.
Since "Godlessness" stemmed from the doctrines of evolution, it followed
that teachers who discussed such doctrines were themselves atheistsand must be silenced. Across the nation (not just its southern perimeter)
school boards barred teachers from even mentioning Darwin. Instructors
brazen enough to do so risked summary discharge. In several instances,
boards established new hiring policies explicitly excluding "Darwinian"
applicants. Universities were not immune. Bryan liked to boast that he
had personally engineered the suspension or dismissal of several "infidel"
professors who had dared to teach evolution-and whose well-publicized
fate reminded academics around the country about the perils of doing
so. Meanwhile, states scrambled to bring textbooks into accord with the
new laws and regulations. Books discussing evolution disappeared from
the classroom; in at least four states, they were publicly burned. In Arkansas, the state superintendent of instruction ordered the removal of
Encyclopedia Britannica, the World Book Encyclopedia, and Webster's
International Dictionary from schools, because all three alluded to Darwin. In Georgia, the state legislature held up an appropriation for a
library, for fear that its shelves might contain illegal evolution-related
materials.60
No such "chilling effect" accompanied Scientific Temperance Instruction. Of course STI sprang from "religious" premises: indeed, Hunt's
defense of child depravity-like Bryan's diatribe against Darwin-re-
58 By "intellectually unfit," I mean only that most advocates of anti-evolution did not
possess the educational background or credentials of the "modernists" who opposed them.
I do not, however, share Butler's fear of their influence-nor do I think the matter is
relevant in evaluating whether anti-evolution was "repressive."
59According to the theory developed here, even the hilarious bill proposed in one state
legislature to change the value of pi from 3.1416 to 3.000 ("because the Bible described
Solomon's vase as three times as far around as across") would not necessarily qualify as
"repressive."We would deem it repressive only if it squelched deliberation-if, for instance,
students were not allowed to question the legislature's act. Nelkin, Creation Controversy,
31.
60 The Commoner (Feb. 1920), 11, quoted in Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 126; Gatewood, Controversy, 38-39, 35-36, 298; Riley, "The Fight against
Evolution," 282-83, 287; Bailey, Southern White Protestantism, 86.
28
History of Education Quarterly
fleeted a Biblical literalism that "high-critic" theologians mocked.6' Of
course STI constrained teachers: laws often specified the number and
length of temperance lessons, the age of the pupils that must receive them,
which age groups must have textbooks, the total pages that texts must
devote to STI-and the penalties for teachers or (more commonly) schools
that failed to comply. Yet neither STI's religious roots nor its statutory
stipulations restricted democratic deliberation, inside or outside of
schools. Naturally, parents and teachers raised objections to STI.62Yet
the test of repression, Gutmann reminds us, "is not popularity among
citizens, parents, teachers, or public officials. Repression entails restriction of rational inquiry, not conflict with personal beliefs, however deeply
held those beliefs." Despite its religious origins, Scientific Temperance
rested upon secular standards of reasoning and thus remained fair game
for debate: one could question STI without questioning the sanctity of
God. Despite its constraints upon teachers, Scientific Temperance did
not dictate how they would teach and thus preserved their deliberative
freedom: they could instruct STI without forsaking their own critical
consciousness, a necessary condition for developing the same capacity in
their students.63
Of course, STI women did not consciously aim to provoke such
classroom inquiry. Indeed, there are plenty of indications that they tried
to prevent it.64 Hunt and her allies consistently warned teachers against
discussing "the ethical and moral sides" of temperance, both "better
taught in the home and Sunday school." In public institutions, Hunt
insisted, instructors need only dispense the unitary truths of scienceincluding the "poisonous" nature of alcohol. As physiologists and other
laboratory experts undermined this claim, however, Hunt was forced to
61 See Ferenc Morton Szasz, The Divided Mind of Protestant America, 1880-1930
(University, Ala., 1982).
62 Immigrant parents often worried that STI would alienate them from their offspring.
See, for example, Mary H. Hunt, "Practical Working of the Ainsworth School Physiology
Law in New York State," School Physiology Journal (Oct. 1896), 21. Teachers, meanwhile,
complained about the "overdrawn" statements in textbooks and the young age at which
students were introduced to the subject. Male teachers seemed more likely than female
instructors to resist STI. See, for example, teacher surveys at frame 381, roll 11, frame
398, roll 12, frame 410, roll 12, and frame 508, roll 12, STF Series.
63 Gutmann, "Democratic Education in Difficult Times," 17; idem, Democratic Education, 103-4, 76, 42-44.
64 Kenneth Strike has suggested that popular demands upon school curricula should
be rejected if they are "motivated by . . . the desire to restrict familiarity or inquiry." Yet
both the STI experience and more recent curricular controversies suggest that this "intentionalist" standard is far too strict, excluding censorious impulses that-in practice-often
enhance critical inquiry. Kenneth Strike, "A Field Guide of Censors: Toward a Concept
of Censorship in Public Schools," Teachers College Review 87 (Winter 1985): 246; Boyd,
"The Changing Politics of Curricular Policy-Making," 604.
"TheQueen of the Lobby"
29
shift ground. Unable to enlist prominent American scientists for her STI
"Advisory Board," she loaded it with clergymen and educators because
"this subject is one of morals and pedagogy as well as of physiology and
hygiene," as one board member admitted. Within the classroom, meanwhile, STI attempts to "dictate methods" came to naught-or turned
teachers against the subject, as Hunt often warned. Local STI workers
must exercise "special care" during classroom visits, she wrote, so teachers are not "antagonized" and they "may feel that we come to them in
a spirit of helpfulness rather than criticism." These were not the words
of a woman who suppressed schoolhouse inquiry, no matter how much
she and her minions may have wished to do so.65
In a similar vein, Hunt sought to create a "cartel" of WCTU-endorsed textbooks and to exclude other books-and, therefore, other opinions-from the market, as Philip J. Pauly has recently argued. But she
failed. No evidence suggests that she "scared away writers and publishers
interested in preparing books that would be real alternatives to the books
she promoted," as Pauly claims. On the contrary-and much to Hunt's
dismay-such books kept appearing. From Pennsylvania to Oregon, competing publishers flooded school boards and schoolhouses with free samples of their wares; and thousands of districts adopted these "unscientific
and unpedagogical" texts, as Hunt complained. The problem seemed
particularly acute in the South, where books were often selected by state
commissions and rival texts prevailed. Even the notorious American Book
Company-which merged four large companies that published "correct"
STI books, in exchange for Hunt's endorsement-continued to publish
unendorsed books, as well. Indeed, Hunt would eventually break with
this "book trust," charging that the company promoted the unendorsed
texts more often-and more enthusiastically-than the endorsed ones.66
Despite its patently repressive impulses, then, STI engaged literally
hundreds of thousands of Americans in precisely the sort of "conversation
. . . about the meaning and value of our common life" that eludes Robert
65 "Objects to Proposed Law," Hartford Courant [1901 ?], box 1, Scientific Temperance
Federation Papers, New York Public Library; Pauly, "The Struggle for Ignorance"; A. H.
Plumb to "Dear Sir," 14 Sep. 1904, box 1, Scientific Temperance Federation Papers; MHH
to Augusta R. Brigham, 4 Oct. 1899, frames 316-17, roll 6, and MHH to J. G. Trurgn,
31 Oct. 1899, frames 567-69, roll 6, STF Series. On the question of alcohol as a "poison,"
see note 30 above.
66 Pauly, "The Struggle for Ignorance," 373; Philip J. Pauly, personal correspondence
in the possession of the author, 18 Dec. 1990; A. A. Meader to MHH, 14 July 1885, frame
93, roll 15, Meader to MHH, 2 June 1886, frame 87, roll 15, E. F. Adams to L. S. Tobey,
27 Jan. 1887, frames 630-31, roll 16, MHH to Mattie G. Shook, 9 Aug. 1901, frame 220,
roll 16, and MHH to Harriet B. Kells, 6 Oct. 1904, frame 266, roll 16, STF Series; Mary
H. Hunt, "The Victory of Truth," Union Signal, 30 Oct. 1890; MHH to A. C. Barnes, 11
Sep. 1901, frame 239, roll 16, STF Series.
30
Historyof EducationQuarterly
Bellah and his colleagues in their 1985 bestseller, Habits of the Heart.
As many critics have noted, the authors' call for such a dialog lacks any
indication about how their exclusively middle-class respondents-sequestered in atomistic "lifestyle enclaves"-might begin the dialog with
each other, let alone with the members of other classes. The STI experience suggests that school policies can provide the necessary forum for
a truly broad-gauged debate-but only if the policies at issue extend
across localities. Debate within an enclave reinforces exclusivity: it "enhances the immediate tie between neighbors," writes Benjamin Barber,
"but it thereby subverts the wider ties required by democracy." Scientific
Temperance nurtured these ties by alternately focusing deliberation at
local and state levels, where citizens, teachers, and their legislative representatives began the process of creative consensus-"an agreement that
arises out of common talk, common decision, and common work."67
Indeed, consensus arises-or, more correctly, can arise-out of our
common schools, which enter the 1990s under a torrent of scholarly and
popular abuse. Strange bedfellows on the left and right have joined hands
to demand the "privatization" or even abolition of American public
schools, which allegedly "compel belief" and hence undermine the constitutionally guaranteed liberties of parents and students.68Here Scientific
Temperance provides a vivid counterexample, a massive popular movement that allowed Americans to deliberate and transmit consensual values
without violating individuals' capacity to deliberate these values. Since
Horace Mann, however, school officials have avoided questions of religious or political controversy, fearing that they will insult parental
sensibilities-and shrink enrollments.69The result has been a curriculum
of colossal incoherence and vacuity, as critics correctly note. But the
answer is not to abandon our common schools and retreat to enclaves
of the like-minded, reinforcing prejudices and parochialisms. Instead, we
should aim toward a new conversation about our schools, "an argument
in the best sense," repressive of none and-just as important-accessible
to all.7"Scientific Temperance reminds us that we can reinfuse our schools
with questions that matter-and can rediscover the integrative potential
of democratic education in America.
67 Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, 303, 335; Barber, Strong Democracy, 235, 224.
For critiques of Bellah et al., see Charles H. Reynolds and Ralph V. Norman, eds., Community in America: The Challenge of Habits of the Heart (Berkeley, Calif, 1988).
68 Arons, Compelling Belief; Charles L. Glenn, "Religion, Textbooks, and the Common
School," Public Interest 88 (Summer 1987): 28-47; Charles L. Glenn, The Myth of the
Common School (Amherst, Mass., 1988). See also David Tyack and Stephen Arons, "Freedom of Thought and Majority Rule in the Public School: The Bankruptcy of Liberal
Ideology," Teachers College Record 85 (Summer 1984): 653-62.
69 R. Freeman Butts, The Civic Mission in Educational Reform: Perspectives for the
Public and the Profession (Stanford, Calif., 1989), 121, 130.
70 Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, 303.