CHAPTER ONE

What Does Jesus Have to Do with Phonics?

Understanding Educational Conservatism

I’m certainly not the first to wonder about the impact of conservative ideas and activism in American education. Given generations of earnest and even brilliant attempts at wholesale progressive reform, historians have asked, why does the basic footprint of schooling remain so stubbornly conservative?1 Yet even the most perspicacious scholars offer unsatisfying explanations of the sticky traditionalism of American education. For example, at the tail end of the twentieth century, historians David Tyack and Larry Cuban argued that traditional schooling practices had not generally been sustained by “conscious conservatism.” Rather, conservative education policies had been maintained by “unexamined institutional habits and widespread cultural beliefs.”2
This explanation underestimates the leading role played by what this book calls the “other school reformers”—conservative activists just as earnest as progressive educators, just as dedicated to shaping schools to fit their vision of proper education and culture. These activists were not vague trends; they were not amorphous tendencies. They were, instead, specific people making specific claims about specific educational programs. Separated by decades, working for different causes, these activists did not simply rely on “unexamined institutional habits” or “widespread cultural beliefs” to accomplish their goals. Quite the opposite. Conservatives worked hard to examine and articulate their prescriptions for proper schooling in their specific times and places.
Indeed, so much conservative school activism has been directed toward the specific, limited goals of unique controversies that we must ask a difficult question: Is there any value in discussing these conservatives as a group, as a coherent tradition? In other words, is there any reason to talk about “educational conservatism”? Or have conservatives throughout the twentieth century simply reacted to immediate concerns, simply cobbled together policy prescriptions that had little meaningful connection to one another?
I believe the chapters that follow demonstrate the existence and the importance of a recognizable tradition, a puzzlingly underexplored impulse best called “educational conservatism.” Though there have been significant changes among educational conservatives, there are powerful threads that connect the sorts of conservative ideas and activism we saw in 1925 with those on display in 1939, 1951, and 1975.

A Slippery Task

Before we can make sense of these connections in the tradition of educational conservatism, we must attempt to define conservatism as a whole. In all of these discussions, labels get complicated very quickly. Key terms such as “conservative,” “progressive,” and “traditional” quickly pile up in contradictory ways. As with the emotion-laden labels “democracy” and “freedom,” school activists, like other political activists, have bandied these terms about as weapons.3 For instance, should schools be “modern” and “democratic”? Should they “indoctrinate” or “subvert” students? As the chapters to come will illustrate, the use of these terms must be understood as political acts. Pasting a “conservative,” “traditional,” “liberal,” or “progressive” label on any given educational policy or reform often tells us more about the person doing the labeling than about the policy itself.
Given the difficulty of labeling, historians often get nervous about offering a definition of conservatism. After all, conservatism has always included a shifting conglomeration of ideas and meanings. Definitions tend to be too broad, too narrow, or too partisan to be of real use. For some, conservatism has meant a defense of limited government. For others, a traditional Protestant public sphere, an ordered society, or freer markets. In different decades and different circumstances, conservatism has meant opposition to the New Deal, opposition to loosening family structures, opposition to desegregation, to modernism in theology or socialism in politics. As historian Kim Phillips-Fein has argued recently, the perspective with which historians have viewed conservatism has resulted in a grab bag of different definitions and timelines.4
In many cases, educational issues became the heart and soul of conservative public activism. Yet the centrality of such issues to the development of American conservatism has not been adequately recognized by historians. This absence is doubly puzzling since the study of conservatism has become something of a growth industry among historians in the past twenty years. The field has expanded beyond a narrow exploration of the political roots of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory to include a sense of the longer history of conservatism and the many varieties of theological, economic, cultural, and political activism that have contributed to the conservative impulse. Yet in spite of all this scholarly activity, conservatives’ preoccupation with education and schooling has not received the attention it deserves from historians.5
A few examples will illustrate the conundrum. Recently, Kim Phillips-Fein offered an insightful catalog of recent historical work about American conservatism.6 As Phillips-Fein pointed out, historians have learned a great deal about American conservatism in the past twenty years.7 Each new perspective, Phillips-Fein argued, has enriched our understanding of the meanings and timing of conservatism. In passing, she noticed the centrality to conservatives of public schools,8 higher education,9 and intellectual institutions.10 Yet even given the explosion of interest in the many varieties of conservatism, Phillips-Fein could not find examples of historians who explored the reasons why conservatives remained so interested in educational issues.
Similarly, in their widely read history of conservatism in the 1970s, Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer included chapters on religion, business, foreign affairs, and family life, but nothing on schooling or education policy.11 Of course, books can only have so many chapters, and editors cannot include chapters that no author has written. In this case, however, such a chapter would have added great depth. The educational conservatism at play in the Kanawha County controversy of 1974–75—the subject of Chapter 5—had a decisive impact on key ideas of race and racism, and a long-term impact on the formation of important conservative institutions such as the Heritage Foundation.
Even historians who purport to examine the themes of conservatism in American education tend to tell the story of conservatism as an odd duck, a quirky academic tantrum rather than part of a coherent conservative tradition. For instance, Herbert Kliebard’s widely read Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958 (1987) promised to tell the story of the battle between “different interest groups competing for dominance over the curriculum.”12 Kliebard framed this struggle as the fight between a certain sort of “humanist” conservative against three versions of progressive reformers: “developmentalists,” “social efficiency educators,” and “social meliorists.”13 Kliebard’s “humanists” included such prominent academics as William Torrey Harris in the 1890s,14 Michael Demiashkevich in the 1930s,15 and Arthur Bestor in the 1950s.16 These thinkers hoped, in Kliebard’s words, to save “as best they could their revered traditions and values in the face of rapid change.”17 However, Kliebard’s humanists did not mount the sorts of coordinated, self-consciously conservative campaigns we’ll see in this volume from the 1920s through the 1970s and beyond.18 Kliebard’s humanists did not hope to use traditional teaching to make American society more traditional; they only hoped to maintain academic achievement as the true purpose of schooling.
If we hope to understand the history of conservatism we must include a more thorough study of the ways conservatives in different decades and in different contexts have approached issues of education and schooling. After all, however we define conservatism, we see that its central tenets are always intimately, inseparably bound up with complicated notions of learning and schooling.
By including educational conservatism in the study of American conservatism as a whole, we can also gain a new perspective on the timing of that conservatism. As part of their lively debates about the boundaries of American conservatism, historians have argued for different timelines for conservatism’s career. Depending on historians’ primary interests, stories of American conservatism have been told in strikingly different ways.
In the field of intellectual history, for example, George Nash’s 1976 argument about the timing of conservatism has proven remarkably influential.19 Nash argued that the modern conservative intellectual movement only came together after 1945. Before that time, Nash insisted, there were only “scattered voices of protest” among conservative intellectuals.20
From the perspective of political history, on the other hand, a different view of conservatism emerged. As historian Donald Critchlow has argued, from a political perspective conservatism transformed itself from a group of “kooks” in the mid-1950s to a group firmly in control of American politics by the end of the twentieth century.21 Other historians have echoed this notion that conservatism evolved from a group of political outsiders in the 1950s to the ultimate insiders with the election of Ronald Reagan.22
Then again, when historians have defined conservatism primarily as a fight against big government, different timelines and different lead actors have emerged. David Farber began his history of modern conservatism with the 1938 election of Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. Taft made his career as a fervent opponent of the New Deal and all it represented.23 This “progenitor of modern conservatism,” Farber argued,24 defined the movement simply as opposition to “liberalism.”25
Some historians have argued that the histories of twentieth-century conservatism must begin in the 1920s. Allan Lichtman insisted that the modern conservative movement began in the aftermath of World War I.26 Leonard Moore asserted that “the 1920s were . . . the first years of the modern Right.”27 Kim Nielsen sought to demonstrate that in the 1920s, “conservative women, though few, were well organized, vocal, and ideologically sophisticated.”28 Yet as Leo Ribuffo has noted, “early, mainline conservatism languishes in the academic doldrums.”29
Perhaps the difficulties of connecting 1920s-era conservatism with that of later generations come from the real and important transformations that revolutionized the meanings of conservatism in the 1920s and 1930s. As we’ll see in the coming pages, leading educational conservatives in the 1920s called loudly for an increased role for the federal government in local schooling. They assumed that their vision of non-sectarian Protestant religiosity must form the backbone of public education. And they spent very little time arguing that they were not racist. Among later generations of conservatives, all of those positions underwent radical changes.
But such changes do not mean that the conservatism that emerged along with the New Deal or after World War II is best described as something entirely new. As this volume will demonstrate, educational conservatives repeated and revived themes and goals from the 1920s through the 1970s, time and again. Leading conservative organizations—groups such as the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution—continued to reform schools in conservative directions from one generation to the next. By making room for this tradition of educational activism in our study of conservatism, we can see that conservatives themselves often experienced no difficulties connecting the generations from the 1920s onward.
In addition, incorporating the themes and tradition of educational conservatism into our study of the history of American conservatism as a whole can offer a new perspective on the ways conservative activists brought together a variety of issues into a coherent, recognizably conservative ideology. Too often, as Jennifer Burns has argued, historians and other scholars seize glibly upon George Nash’s 1976 typology of conservatism.30 Nash argued that three strains of conservative thought came together after World War II to form the modern conservative intellectual movement. Libertarianism, anti-communism, and Burkean traditionalism made up a powerful “fusionist” conservatism. This sense of conservatism as an alliance, a conscious coming-together of disparate strands of conservatism, fits well with the intellectual movement described by Nash. After all, leading thinkers such as Frank Meyer made a powerful case for this definition.31
Outside of the elite intellectual circles on which Nash focused, however, the notion of a conscious alliance of distinct conservative visions grates awkwardly and misleadingly against historical experience. Most of the conservative activists in the fight for better schooling did not separate out their reasons for doing so. That is, “patriotic” school reformers did not decide to make tactical common cause with “religious” conservatives, enrolling the help of “free-market” leaders as they went. Rather, activists tended to blend together conservative themes more seamlessly and organically. Of course, some leaders had different emphases and primary goals. As we’ll see throughout this book, the American Legion focused on what could be called “patriotic” reforms. The National Association of Manufacturers defended its vision of big-business capitalism. And religious leaders throughout the twentieth century saw the main goal of school reform as protecting the faith of the innocent schoolchildren.
But to a remarkable extent, school activists di...