Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports 2015 The Cold Culture Wars: The Fight for Democratic Education in Post-War New York Brandon C. Williams Follow this and additional works at: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd Recommended Citation Williams, Brandon C., "The Cold Culture Wars: The Fight for Democratic Education in Post-War New York" (2015). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 6955. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/6955 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by the The Research Repository @ WVU with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you must obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Dissertation has been accepted for inclusion in WVU Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports collection by an authorized administrator of The Research Repository @ WVU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Cold Culture Wars: The Fight for Democratic Education in Post-War New York Brandon C. Williams Dissertation submitted to the Eberly College of Arts & Sciences at West Virginia University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Ph.D., Chair Ken-Fones-Wolf, Ph.D. James Siekmeier, Ph.D. Samuel Stack, Ph.D. Melissa Bingmann, Ph.D. Department of History Morgantown, WV 2015 Keywords: Democratic Education, Intercultural Education, Cold War, Civil Rights Copyright 2015 Brandon C. Williams ABSTRACT The Cold Culture Wars: The Fight for Democratic Education in Post-War New York Brandon C. Williams This dissertation explores how the American public school system has become the primary institution for citizens to project, contest, or affirm their values. Primarily, this revolves around competing ideas of democratic education. After World War II, politicians utilized the schools to propagate American democracy, while citizens viewed education as a means to reconstruct the post-war democratic order. Although most representatives acknowledged the schools needed to guard democracy and stem totalitarian aggression, few agreed on how education should accomplish such a feat. Consequently, “democratic education” deviated from its theoretical moorings and found a newly nationalistic expression in a Cold War era of scrutiny and hyper-politicization This development magnified the societal importance of the American school, as debates no longer hinged around purely education but rather over competing notions of American democracy. Indeed, no longer were educational disputes the sole domain of rival educational camps. Rather educational disputes once contained within schoolroom walls increasingly became hashed out in New York’s schools, churches, labor unions, civic centers, and neighborhoods. These educational disputes, heightened in fury, and feverish in pitch, ushered in a new era of educational controversy that became part of America’s Cold Culture Wars. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Throughout my many years in graduate school, I never encountered another doctoral student with a community-college background. Without the support of my parents, there would have been one less. Thank you Mom and Dad. iii Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………..……ii Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………..……iii Chapter One: Introduction……………………………………………………………..……………………..1 Chapter Two: Beyond Dewey: The Popularization of Democratic Education………..............................................................18 Chapter Three: Towards an Educational Arsenal of Democracy: The Popularization of Democratic Education During World War II……………..…….........49 Chapter Four: Mutual Assured Instruction: “Playing it Safe” with Controversial Issues in the Cold War Classroom…......…………....118 Chapter Five: Pedagogical Brinkmanship: Teaching Race and Russia in McCarthy’s America………………………………………..156 Chapter Six: Curricular Containment: Bureaucratic McCarthyism, Civic Education, and the Fight for a “Living Democracy ”......218 Chapter Seven: Conclusion....................................................................................................255 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………...259 iv Chapter 1: Introduction Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Cold War Americans of all political stripes wrangled over the meaning of democratic education. In 1948, leading progressive thinkers, politicians, and educational luminaries gathered from across the nation to acknowledge the “father” of democratic education, John Dewey, on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday. Always modest, John Dewey criticized the “fuss and bother” as schools and universities throughout America paid “homage to the man who probably has influenced American education more than any other person.” Although celebrants hailed Dewey as a progressive icon, even more people envisioned Dewey as a paragon of American democracy. Great Britain Prime Minister Clement Attlee asserted that Dewey’s influence “throughout the English speaking world” ultimately strengthened “the democratic way of life” by illustrating the “true meaning of democracy.” Representative Franklin Roosevelt Jr. added, “for those of us who are striving for the implementation of his democratic philosophies in government, Dr. Dewey is a source of continuing stimulus and inspiration.” William Montague, Dewey’s close personal colleague, also praised Dewey “for teaching the world to see that the central reliance of democracy is on a free and intelligence choice made by all citizens.” Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter further argued that Dewey’s “robust faith” had influenced the justice’s own varied thinking on “the governing forces of a democratic society.” Indeed, Dewey’s democratic contributions ventured far beyond the “English speaking world,” as Mexico, Israel, Japan, France, Holland, Sweden, and a multitude of other nations all celebrated Dewey’s democratic programs. The confluence of Dewey’s democratic legacy and the global mark of his influence ultimately led the New York Times to observe that Dewey was as “solid 1 as the granite” of his Vermont birthplace, and that he was deeply “American” in both “thought and outlook.” 1 While progressives, liberals, and educational reformers praised Dewey with democratic acclaim, a growing chorus of conservatives and anticommunists asserted that the thinker’s ideals endangered American democracy. Assailing Dewey and the “patronage network of Teachers College,” conservatives increasingly attributed the weakening of American schools to the decades long “infiltration” of Dewey and his legions of progressive educators. These critics impugned progressive education as staid and outdated and asserted that it uprooted American traditions and weakened American democracy. Irene Kuhn’s, “Your Child is Their Target,” outlined how members of this well-orchestrated “minority” sought to advance a “blueprint” for a “socialistic America” that ran counter to democratic values. Asserting that these educators sought “to accomplish the same results with our children that dictator-ruled countries have,” Kuhn warned that pedagogical schemers operated in a surreptitious manner that was both “disguised” and “undercover.” Noting that Dewey’s students once operated under the mantra “there is no God but Dewey,” Kuhn argued that subversive progressives concealed their dangerous educational plans in Deweyan theories that proclaimed to “benefit the child” and to “prepare today’s child to be tomorrow’s citizen.” Consequently, Cold War conservatives and post-war progressives jousted over the meaning of John Dewey and his democratic ideals, thereby proving Charles Frankel’s rather incisive 1 “John Dewey At 90 to Get $90,000 Gift,” The New York Times , October 19, 1949; “World Cheers Dewey at Lively 90,” The New York Times , October 21, 1949. 2 observation, “To know where we stand toward Dewey’s ideas is to find out, at least in part, where we stand with ourselves.” 2 The pitched political tensions surrounding democratic education revealed how Cold War schools had transformed into a blank canvas for Americans to project their Cold War anxieties. Indeed, the early postwar era was a time of conflict between two competing visions of the world, one a social democratic vision that embodied campaigns for equal rights, industrial democracy, economic equality and social justice, and the other that embodied a commitment to individualism, consumerism free enterprise and the “defense of the social and economic status quo.” 3 Cold War New York stood at the center of these debates, as the city’s political landscape nurtured the growth of progressive coalitions and reactionary politics. Thus, New York’s political left--representing unionists, educational reformers, civil rights coalitions, and grassroots organizations— couched their agendas in terms of a reformist interpretation of American democracy. In doing so, they sought to empower organized labor, create a national health care system, fight for racial equality, and realize Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s call for an economic bill of rights. Conversely, the power wielded by New York’s leftist coalitions inspired anticommunists to respond with a political force that was detached from the paranoia and hysterics