The last posting began this
blog’s effort to relay a developmental description of how America, from its
origins – its colonial past – to the years following World War II, held onto a
version of federalism. That version,
this writer calls parochial/traditional federalism. It held – more than any other perspective – on
how Americans viewed governance and politics.
As any theoretical
approach, this version promoted a set of values and beliefs that were not at
all times consistent or even pristinely logical. And, during its years of dominance, people
varied in how exactly each interpreted its tenets. Generally, the view upheld the values of
cooperation, collaboration, and community.
It is these values, among others, that one can detect
underlying the principles of the US Constitution as the founding
generation came together and formed the nation’s government. In a public relations coup, the faction that
proposed and argued for the ratification of the Constitution took on the
name, the Federalists, even though the term today is associated with local or
state governments. This cast their
opponents as the Anti-Federalists who argued for maintaining the bulk of power
at the state level.
But at its heart, the term federalist
fit the national effort because what the new agreement was calling for was a
federated relationship among the states and the people of the United States. And to be federated means that those entities
were committed to work toward cooperation, collaboration, and community. But a problem remained: who constituted “the people”? Since the original settlers in the eastern
seaboard first arrived, there were already a slew of “Others” who had arrived
by 1800.
Mostly, this consisted of voluntary
immigrants, but some were forced. By the
time of the Constitution, many immigrants from a variety of European
nations had made the trip over the Atlantic and the pure Anglo makeup of the American
population already had become significantly mixed. Of course, the forced element consisted of
African slaves who began to be brought over in 1619 and by the time of the
Constitutional Convention, the slave population was at 500,000, a significant
number since the population of the nation was roughly 3.9 million.[1]
Americans – its original
Anglo contingency – were more or less forced to accept the other European nationals
and by the late 1700s, when several generations of this mixing had transpired,
they defined the white population of the US.
But this was their extent of inclusion.
Even those who opposed slavery, by and large, saw the acceptance of
blacks as an inclusionary step too far. For
them, one can detect a bigoted view of Africans which was extended against indigenous
peoples and the Asians that began making their way here in the 1800s.
Racism, under
parochial/traditional federalist view was alive and well. And one can to a degree see this racism being
detrimental to the survival of this view.
With the New Deal in the 1930s and its limited efforts to deracialize
federal policy, then with the contributions of blacks during World War II, and desegregation
of the armed forces under Truman’s administration, the undermining of legal
segregation began.
And these democratizing
developments debased the legitimacy of the parochial/traditional federalist
view and bolstered the popularization of the natural rights view. But the challenges to this earlier version of
federalism did not begin in the 1930s.
One subplot of the American story, according to this writer, is this
building criticism of federalism, some of it reflected in public policy, some
of it in the form of social developments.
The effort here is to take
note of the major events and the development of ideas that led to this
shift. And this blog has chosen a
telling story concerning American public schools to initiate this effort. The choice is not because this story happened
first, although this writer has shared a Tocqueville account of 1830s America,[2] this
story reflects America in the 1840s. These
accounts provide evidence of what is generally being claimed in this blog: that federalism held strong till the years
after World War II.
The last posting began that
history with an introduction to Horace Mann and his work in Massachusetts to
establish its public school system. That
posting related that under Mann’s leadership, that system encouraged and
advanced defining the profession of teaching as one that should be “manned” by
women. At its base, the reasoning seems
to have been motivated by funding considerations – simply stated, one could
hire women at a cheaper rate than men.
Beyond funding, the policy
also reflected Mann’s sexist beliefs that were described in that posting. What should be mentioned, was that he was not
alone in these beliefs, they were generally accepted to varying degrees among
Americans, including women. One of his
main advisors was a woman by the name Catherine Beecher. She promoted women’s role in education and,
in time, was instrumental in getting women to go out west and fill teaching
positions across the rough western communities in what is now considered the Midwest.
She supported Mann’s
initiative to shift the occupation of teaching as being defined mostly as a
female profession. They fought against
certain prejudices that held that if teaching was feminized it would lead to
weaken academic standards and debasing school discipline especially among male
students. Mann defended his policy by
various arguments, but somewhat central, beyond the $11,000 (worth $329, 334.94
today) female teacher corps saved Massachusetts’ taxpayers in an 1800s’ budget,
by writing:
As a teacher of schools … how divinely does she come, her head
encircled with a halo of heavenly light, her feet sweetening the earth on which
she treads, and the celestial radiance of her benignity making vice begin its
work of repentance through very envy of the beauty of virtue![3]
As an ideal one can detect some biases and presumptions
about teaching. And these views reflect
religious leanings. To remind the
reader, from the last posting, the connection was made between federalist
thinking and Puritanical/Calvinistic beliefs.
In all of this, while congregational thinking of this tradition affected
constitutional thinking in all American states, it was strongest in the New
England states. And in this, there is an
irony.
Initially, Mann rebelled against Puritanical, religious
thinking and adopted phrenology (a belief that physical features affect behavior). By diminishing predestination, Mann saw
phrenology as beliefs that led to proactive education to meet the shortcomings
of young people. But in this, which was
ironic in of itself, he downgraded the importance of academic goals in
educating the masses.
His view of public education emphasized the social –
congregational – qualities that led to a cooperative, collaborative, and
communal population with a religious bent.
The overall purpose of public schooling should promote students’ “affection
outward in good-will towards men, and upward in reverence to God.”[4] This stood in counter distinction to European
public schooling.
For example, Prussian schools – of which Mann saw through
admiring eyes – upped teacher salaries to hold on to their male teachers and
French schools promoted high academic standards with secular content (the
French were prone to critique German school curricula as being too religious).
Next posting will look at what Mann’s contributions meant
to the religious, parochial foundations of American federalism as it was considered
in the early 1800s. This writer hopes he
is expressing that a culturally based idea with its associated ideals of governance
and politics is not a well thought out ideology.
It is instead a mixture of
beliefs and emotions that are expressed in a more or less logically congruent
argument about how and why a polity exists.
But that level of coherence is enough to project a clear sense of what
is considered politically legitimate.
And in the 1800s it was securely considered legitimate for schools to
promote a view of morality.
[1]
“How Things Have Changed in Philadelphia Since the 1787 Convention,” Constitution
Daily (May 25,2016), accessed January 21, 2021, https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/how-things-have-changed-since-1787#:~:text=The%20population%20of%20the%20United,were%20being%20held%20as%20slaves.
[2]
Robert
Gutierrez, Toward a Federated Nation:
Implementing National Civics Standards (Tallahassee, FL: Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020). See pages 78-79.
[3]
Dana
Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled
Profession (New York, NY: Doubleday,
2014), 27. The historical information concerning
Mann in this posting is drawn from this source.
[4] Ibid., 28.
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