During the 1910s, 20s, and 30s, universal schooling became a centerpiece of progressive reform efforts. It also became a rallying cry for a variety of conservative political forces—including nativist groups, the business right, the American legion, and even the Klan—who saw indoctrination in schools as a local manifestation of broader social conflicts over both labor politics and the country’s ethno-racial identity.
Indeed, conservative reaction to ongoing developments produced a proliferation of bills that concerned school instruction. One kind of bill, adopted by 43 states by 1931, required mandatory instruction in the Constitution. While these bills may not be identical to the Texas bill discussed above, they certainly rhyme. As one key proponent noted, the point of the bills was to establish a “uniformity of instruction” throughout the country focused on instilling patriotic devotion. The aim was to prevent socialist or progressive teachers at the local level from educating students to critically evaluate the Constitution or the principles of 1776. The purpose of education, according to the bills’ sponsors, was above all instilling loyalty in the established institutions and in American nationalism.
A second set of bills at the state level, which also proliferated during the 1910s and 20s, were concerned with English-only instruction. These bills went hand in hand with national origin quotas at the congressional level, which banned migration from Asia and Africa and dramatically constricted migration from southern and eastern Europe. After the enactment of these quotas, over 80 percent of the people who entered the country were from western and northern Europe, and the percentage of foreign-born people in the US would decline from 10-15% to just 5% over the course of the mid-20th century.
Why is it that school instruction became such a galvanizing site of white reactionary politics? And why did schools, in particular, become a space for cementing alliances between nativist groups, the business right, and even the second Klan of the 1920s—the latter as much an organization of the North and West as the South?
For each of these groups, there was an immediate power to talking about indoctrination in schools. Compared to abstract conversations about labor rights and the nature of regulation, the focus on schools allowed the business right to point to a creeping socialism—“government-run” schools—that had a direct effect on the capacity of families to control the terms of instruction of their own children. Similarly, for nativist groups, these bills provided a way of tapping into a mass constituency for their aims. Such laws identified a specific threat to an Anglo-European cultural identity—a threat that, through schooling, was turning children against parents, and in doing so, breaking the basic terms of traditionalist American society.