Schooling and Citizenship in Turn-Of-The- Century Tucson, Arizona
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Educated Arguments: Schooling and Citizenship in Turn-of-the-Century Tucson, Arizona Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Grey, Amy Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 02/10/2021 22:19:22 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/325418 EDUCATED ARGUMENTS: SCHOOLING AND CITIZENSHIP IN TURN-OF-THE- CENTURY TUCSON, ARIZONA by Amy Grey __________________________ Copyright © Amy Grey A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2014 2 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Amy Grey, titled EDUCATED ARGUMENTS: SCHOOLING AND CITIZENSHIP IN TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY TUCSON, ARIZONA, and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date: December 6, 2013 Katherine Morrissey Date: December 6, 2013 Benjamin Irvin Date: December 6, 2013 J.C. Mutchler Date: December 6, 2013 Laura Briggs Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. Date: December 6, 2013 Dissertation Director: Katherine Morrissey 3 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. SIGNED: Amy Grey 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My absolute gratitude to the members of my brilliant, sympathetic, and witty comprehensive exam and dissertation committees: Katherine Morrissey, Benjamin Irvin, Laura Briggs, J. C. Mutchler, and Jadwiga Pieper-Mooney. Without archivists, historians would simply not exist. Many of the archivists who helped me were amazingly knowledgeable, cheerful about my unrelenting requests, and full of good ideas for further research. I could not have written a word without them: Alexandria Caster, Laura Hoff, and Erin Wahl, Archivists, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson Sister Patricia Rose Shanahan, CSJ, Archivist, Los Angeles Province (Sister Patricia Rose was wonderfully helpful and she even took me to lunch in the Provincial House.) Nancy Siner, Archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Tucson Archivists for Saint Mary’s Hospital (CSJ local records), Tucson Wendi Goen, Archivist, Arizona State Library, Archives, and Public Records, Phoenix A special thank you to the tireless and brave members of my writing group and the essential people who have read various chapters along the way: Robin Zenger, Kathryn Gallien, Linda English (UTPA), Megan Prins, Vikas Rathee, Kelley Merriam-Castro, Sigma Colón, Marcus Burtner, and James Douglas Lockhart, III. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT 6 INTRODUCTION Educated Arguments: Schooling and Citizenship in Turn-of-the-Century Tucson 8 CHAPTER ONE “The Pride of Tucson:” Saint Joseph’s Academy for Young Ladies 36 CHAPTER TWO “May the Two Republics Go On Hand in Hand:” Tucson’s Public School 71 CHAPTER THREE “The Spectacle of a Farmer Bending Over a Washtub:” Tucson Indian Industrial School 100 CHAPTER FOUR “They May Segregate Pupils of the African from Pupils of the White Races:” Paul Laurence Dunbar School 130 CHAPTER FIVE “Class Prophecy:” Mary J. Platt Industrial School for Mexican Girls 162 CONCLUSION 185 WORK CITED 197 6 ABSTRACT American founding documents did not include explicit definitions of citizenship, which left many people living in the boundaries of the United States with an uncertain relationship to the status of citizen. The result has been an ongoing cultural debate about the rights and responsibilities attending American citizenship. Many of these debates are very local, as neighbors met with neighbors and defined for themselves who they felt was best suited for full American national belonging. This dissertation examines some of those local debates in the context of new school development in the small, desert town of Tucson, Arizona, between 1870 and the late 1920s. Arizona officials were actively in pursuit of statehood during most of this period; bring citizenship to the forefront of public discussion. New schools were one vital resource in the efforts to “civilize” Arizona to meet national expectations. It was in the fundraising and organizing of these new schools that Arizonans often voiced their expectations about who could and should be a fully active American citizen. These very passionate educational debates in turn-of-the-century Tucson provide a window into the local processes of cultural definition and redefinition of American citizenship that were enacted in small towns and neighborhoods throughout the nation. The first section of the dissertation introduces and defines the idea of cultural citizenship that must be constructed in the process of building legal and political definitions of citizenship. This introduction places the local story of Tucson, Arizona, into the larger context of cultural citizenship and theorization about multi-cultural America. Chapter one traces the history of the first Tucson school project, Saint Joseph’s Academy for Young Ladies, and its relatively compatible uses for the “civilizing” of both the Mexican frontier north and the American frontier west. This chapter’s argument is that Saint Joseph’s Academy became a primary gendered tool for the definition of a Mexican-American communally-defined citizenship in vigorous counterpoint to the Anglo-American individualistic understanding of citizenship. Chapter two uncovers the explosion of Catholic-Protestant animosity that occurs between supporters of new Tucson publically-funded schools and defenders of the Catholic parochial schools. Out of this animosity, however, arose local visualizations of an American patriotism strengthened by multiple religions and nationalities. Chapter three addresses the Americanization plans of the Presbyterian organizers of the Tucson Indian Industrial Training School and the steady, but quiet, determination of Tohono and Akimel O’odham Indian students to construct their own 7 Native-American citizenship. Returning to the Tucson public schools, chapter four investigates how state-mandated African-American school segregation provided a small space for Tucson’s African-American teachers to impart a sense of racial pride to their students, but also enforced a distinctly marginal citizenship, against which African-American students continued to struggle. The final chapter considers the conflicts between popular culture and religious education in the aspirations of eighth graders graduating from the Methodist-Episcopalian Mary J. Platt School for Poor Mexican Girls and the possibility for Hollywood to expand possibilities for multi- cultured citizenship. All of these case studies of new school projects show how ordinary people grappled with the cultural definition of what it meant to be an American citizen. Assumptions about the characteristics of the gender, race, class, and religion of the ideal American citizen may have led the writers of the U.S. Constitution to leave citizenship undelineated, but the language of equality and liberty in the Bill of Rights has been embraced by generations of Americans to define the ideal American in their own hyphenated image: Mexican-American, Native-American, African-American; leaving Anglo-American as one possibility among many. 8 “Education is always, everywhere, and inevitably political. It cannot be otherwise, for no form of education can be conceived that does not carry within it an intended outcome; that outcome will inevitably spring from one or another vision of human possibility and will intend to have an influence on its recipients’ future and thus on the distribution of justice, goods, and resources. Since politics is ultimately about the distribution of justice, goods, and resources, education is political.”1 INTRODUCTION In an October, 1915, speech to the New York Chapter of the Knights of Columbus, Theodore Roosevelt claimed that: “There is no place here for the hyphenated American, and the sooner he returns to the country of his allegiance the better.”2 At the time, Roosevelt was petitioning President Woodrow Wilson to allow him to raise a volunteer infantry division to join the European war and alternately denouncing Wilson’s non-interventionist stance. The Great War generated a groundswell of support for the “100% American” movement—the idea that immigrants should abandon all former cultural and political allegiances upon their arrival in America and adopt wholeheartedly an “American way of life,” which for Anglo-Americans, such as Roosevelt, generally