Reconsidering Schools and the American

Welfare State

Miriam Cohen

Recalling her experience as an exchange teacher in Birmingham, England,

in 1938-39, in the midst of the Great Depression, Oregon teacher Mary
Kelly, wrote:

When I wimessed the first ‘leaving’day. . . in one of the Birmingham schools

and learned that as soon as the majority of the English children were fourteen
they were through with regular schooling forever, I almost shed tears.
“Do you mean that those girls will never go to high school?” I asked.
“Yes it is true.”
“Will they have jobs or will they be idle?”
“The Education Department will place most of them in positions in homes,
shops or factories. . . .”
There were no graduation exercises, no lovely new dresses, no parents or
relatives invited. I thought of my high-school graduation, which possibly would
never have been if education was not free, because the means were limited. Still
another graduation after going through college on nothing a year permitted
me to take up teaching . . . . T o me, at that moment, there was nothing more
precious than democracy and I mean the ilme~icanzay.’

Whether or not the availability of free education actually delivered

on the promise of American democracy is surely debatable, but the contrast
that Kelly observed between the schooling opportunities for American
teenagers in the Great Depression and their counterparts in England, as
well as other European democracies, was very real. Had Kelly been from
almost any town or city in the northern United States in the late 1930s, she
would have been struck by the same contrast with any other English city.
During the Great Depression both countries had experienced the collapse
of the youth market. One might expect that teenagers in both countries
would remain in school, but while few English children stayed on in school

Miriam Cohen is the Evalyn Clark Professor of History at Vassar College. An earlier version
of this paper was delivered at the Social Science History Association, Baltimore MD, November
2003. Thanks to respondent Michael Katz and panel members. Thanks also to Clyde Griffen,
Michael Hanagan, Mary Lyndon Shanley, Rickie Sohger, and the Histoly ofEdzuatiim Qvmtwly’s
anonymous readers for their comments.

‘Mary Kelly, Adventures of an Exchange Teacher (New York: Vantage Press, 1954), 69-
70.
History ofEducation Quuiterly Vol. 45 No. 4 Winter 2005
512 Histoly of Education Quarter4

past age fourteen, American high schools, particularly in the urban North,
burst at the seams. More and more working-class adolescents stayed on into
the high school years-this was especially true for white working-class
children, but the increase was also true for African-American children. By
1950 the disparity between the United States and England was even greater.
In Pittsburgh, a center of heavy industry, like Birmingham about half of all
IS- I7 year olds remained in school, compared to less than 5 percent of their
Birmingham counterparts.’ In our comparative study of the history of the
welfare state in the United States, England, and France, my co-author,
Michael Hanagan, and I are studying some of the usual features of the
welfare state, which include important entitlement programs, such as social
insurance, and protective labor legislation, but we are also focusing on the
development of mass schooling.
T h s is important in a trans-Atlantic comparison.’ Although the United
States had little tradition of state spending for social welfare, no other
country outmatches it for public expenditures on education. Americans have
never agreed that citizens have the right to jobs, to health care, or to homes.
But even our courts have acted to enforce children’s right to schoolingi
Almost two decades ago, Ira Katznelson and Margaret Weir argued
that since, a t least in part, public schools have been “the guardian and
cultivator of a democratic and egalitarian political culture in the US . . .[their
history] cannot be excised from the treatments of the American welfare-
state and more generally, from social democratic attempts by government
to protect ordinary people from the ravages of the unfettered markets.”’

‘Miriam J. Cohen and Michael Hanagan, “Work, School and Reform: A Comparison
of Birmingham, England and Pittsburgh, USA: 1900-1950,”IntwnatimlLabmand Working-Chss
Histoly 40 (Fall 1991): 67-80.
’The study involves a comparison of national policies in England, France, and the
United States and a detailed look at the politics and policies enacted in two cities for each
country. In the United States, we study New York City and Pittsburgh, for England, London
and Birmingham, for France, Paris and St. Etienne. The cities were chosen so that we might
compare the politics and policies in cities that were characterized almost exclusively by industrial
labor with cities that were characterized by mixed economies and were centers of finance and
trade.
’In 1973, by a vote of 5-4, the United States Supreme Court ruled in an San Antonio
v. Rodrigz~ezthat education was not a right guaranteed by the United States Constitution. On
state court efforts to enforce education rights under stare constitutions, see Lizabeth Cohen,
A Consumer’sRepublic: The Politics of Mass Connimption in Postwar America (New York: Knop f,
2003), 244, Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick, The American Dream and the Public
Schools (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 27. In 1982, the United States Supreme
Court (Pbler v. Doe) did rule that even illegal aliens, though not American citizens are entitled
under the Fourteenth Amendment to public education in Texas. Although education is not a
fundamental right, the Court concluded, it, unlike other government benefits, “has a pivotal
role in maintainingthe fabric of our society.” h t t p l / w . m c . maricopa.edu/bjordan/PlylerDoc.hanl,
1.
’Ira Katzenelson and Margaret Weir, Schoolingfor All: Class, Race and the Decline of the
Democratic Ideal (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 8,s.
Reconsidering Schools and the American Welfare Stdte 513

Despite the explosion of recent histories of the American welfare state-

because it is seen as an alternative to traditional programs of entitlement-
few have paid much attention to schooling. Most scholars of the American
welfare state emphasize the orientation toward schooling as an individualist
alternative to European state spendmg with its focus on communal guarantees.
In America, we have little inclination to provide “floors”-that is, social
guarantees for a minimum standard of living, but most Americans are willing
to open “doors” of opportunity by providing education.6This reconsideration
of the American welfare state shows that the emphasis on schooling has not
always been an alternative for other social welfare reforms, but that at
important moments, efforts to expand schooling have stimulated the growth
of the programs that we traditionally associate with the welfare state.
Campaigning on behalf of the welfare state, activists used the American
commitment to educating children in order to gain support for other state
services.
Understanding how social reformers used the commitment to education
to build social programs and expand government requires recognition of
the complicated expectations that Americans have about the purposes of
schooling. American schooling reflects individualist values, but it has other
goals that call forth collective aspirations as well. Scholars have moved
beyond what Katznelson and Weir term the “stale debate” between the
progressive historians who viewed public schools as democratic institutions
opening opportunities for all and the revisionists who have viewed schools
as elitist enterprises, focused on controlling a potentially rebellious working
class.‘ Their own study of San Francisco and Chicago in the early decades
of the twentieth century showed that elites used schooling to reinforce the
social structure, but at times worlung class-groups successfully exerted
demands that schools meet the needs of their communities.
Numerous studies of education and public policy help us understand
the contradictory values that surround American education. W. Norton
Grubb and Marvin Lazerson, Martin Carnoy and Henry M. Levin, among
others, pointed out that public education reflects a commitment to communal,
democratic, values as well as to individualism.* Historian David Labaree

‘James Patterson, Aniericak Snir&e Against Pooei-ty, 1900-1994 (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1994), Chapter 12; Arnold J. Heidenheimer, “Education and Social Security
Entitlements in Europe and America,” in The Development of the Welfare State in Eiirope and
America ed. Peter Flora and Arnold J. Heidenheimer (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1981), 259-304.
Katznelson and Weir, Schooling for All, 14.
’W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson. Broken Promises: How Americtrns Fail Their
Children [1982] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 130; Martin Camoy and Henry
M. Levin, Schooliizg and Work in the Demooatic State (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1985). See also Hochschild and Scovronick, The American Dmam and the Pnblic Schools.
514 Histoly of Education Quarter4

also explored the contradictory American expectations that schools ought

to promote democratic equality, social efficiency, and individual social
mobility. Because these goals are often at crosspurposes, it has been hard
to generate a consensus about how to improve our ~ c h o o l s . ~
T o appreciate how the commitment to public education has helped
build the social reform state, we must heed Labaree’s important point that
the “ideological characteristics” of both the commitment to individual
mobility and democratic equality share a widespread progressive common
ground. Both goals generate support for expanding access to education
because, to paraphrase Labaree, those concerned with promoting democracy
believe that education is essential so that all can participate politically on
equal terms, and those committed to social mobility believe that access to
schooling is necessary for all to have an equal chance at success. T h e
progressive ideal of education, which embraced both the traditional liberal
commitment to individual meritocracy and a democratic, egalitarian ethos
that promoted wide access, was especially broad reaching in its support,
rallymg the working class, e h c minorities, and the middle class to support
increased access to schooling.’”
At the turn of the twentieth century, the democratic, egalitarian ethos
that propelled many American activists interested in education also stimulated
a group of progressives to support a host of social entitlement programs
associated with the traditional welfare state. As Michael Katz wrote in his
history of the early welfare state, “HOW to implement public responsibility
in a setting where economic and family decisions are considered private is
a dilemma that has undermined almost every effort to use the resources of
the government to ameliorate or eradicate [the social problems that have]
always formed the soft, embarrassing underbelly of this land of prosperity
and opportunity.”’]Progressive social reformers scored some success in
implementing public responsibility by appealing to the broader consensus
regarding state-sponsored schooling.
Loolung at both the campaign on behalf of government relief for poor
widowed mothers and child-labor legislation, this study shows how many
social activists successfully appealed to widespread norms about the right
to schooling to build the American welfare state in the early part of the
twentieth century. The analysis also reminds us of Katznelson and Weir’s
important point that the expansion of public schooling is about the formation

’David F. Labaree, How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning: The Credentials Race
in American Education (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 17,19. See also idem, The
Making of an American High School: The Credentials Market and the Central High School of
Philadelphia, 1838-1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), Chapter 7
”Labaree, How t o Succeed, 37.
“Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Weyare in America
(New York: Basic Books, 1986), 114,115.
Reconsidering Schools and the American Welfare State 515

of modern states.” Not only did progressive social reformers make use of
norms about schooling to generate support for social services, they also
used the educational bureaucracy to provide social services and to implement
labor regulations. In a country characterized by a weak state structure, the
American public school bureaucracy was one of the only available institutions
that could implement the welfare state. In the early decades of the twentieth
century, officials used state and local departments of education to administer
mothers’ pensions and enforce child labor laws.
During the New Deal years of the Great Depression, the next moment
of opportunity for activists engaged in building the welfare state, the politics
of schooling was less important in legitimizing government intervention in
the labor market. Nevertheless, both the American commitment to schooling
and the educational bureaucracy, itself, became crucial components of the
New Deal effort to root out youth labor. Schools across the country faced
an enormous fiscal crisis in the wake of the Depression, just at the time
when they had to accommodate many more students. By the end of the era,
however, as David Tyack, Robert Lowe, and Elisabeth Hansot point out,
most states had increased their aid to public schooling. Moreover, while
the New Deal disappointed the educational establishment, which had hoped
for significant federal aid for public schools, several important emergency
programs designed to deal with economic recovery directly contributed to
the expansion of s~hool ing.’~
In linking federal aid for students to economic recovery, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, as historian Paula Fass shows, set
an important precedent for postwar federal aid to American education.” A
brief look at the relationship between education and the American welfare
state in the post-World War I1years in the conclusion of this paper, however,
shows that increased commitment to schooling does not necessarily build
support for other social programs. At the turn of the twenty-first century,
federal programs to aid schools have been among the only public efforts to
deal with social inequality. American liberals have strategically fallen back
on the traditional faith and commitment to schooling because it can still
generate a t least some public resources to provide for the social welfare of
American society.

“Katznelson and Weir, Schoolrngfor All, 3 1.

“David Tyack, Robert Lowe, and Elisabeth Hansot, Public Schools in Hard Times: The
Greut Depression and Rerent Years (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). See especially
Chapters 2 and 5 .
“Paula Fass, “Without Design: Education Policy in the New Deal,” AmericunJozirnal
ofEdzicutron 91:l (November 1982): 36-64. See also Kevin P. Bower, “‘A favored child of the
state’: Federal Student Aid at Ohio Colleges and Universities, 1934-1943,” Histoly ofEducatzon
Quarterly 44:3 (Fall 2004): 364-387.
516 History of Education Quarterb

Schooling and Social Welfare in the Progressive Era

The campaign for government payments to poor mothers, known as
mothers’ or widows’ pensions, was part of the mobilization among many
middle-class and elite Americans in the 1890s. Many saw the economic
panic of 1893 as a strilung warning about the dangers of relying solely on
the free market to ensure prosperity. The specific crisis contributed to a
sense of urgency about long-term social trends, including corporate abuse
of power, the spread of urban slums, the influx of new immigrants from
southern and eastern Europe, and increasing labor strife.
Within a decade, vast networks of middle-class women energetically
addressed how these social problems affected women and children. Practicing
what historians of women and the welfare state call maternalist politics,
their work on behalf of family welfare ranged widely and included campaigns
to eliminate sweated labor along with projects to teach immigrant mothers
“modem” child-rearing practices; many of the women staffed urban settlement
houses. Reform women also expressed concern about the inadequate sources
of relief available to poor families. To aid one large group of poor families-
single mothers forced to raise children without male incomes-they
campaigned on behalf of state aid to widowed mothers.“
Illinois enacted the first mothers’ pension law in 1911; two years later,
eighteen states had followed suit. By the 1920s the vast majority of American
states had enacted some sort of mothers’ pension program.16In most cases,
the laws provided assistance to poor widows, determined to be of “good
character,” with children of school-age or younger; in a few instances, the
statutes included aid to mothers whose husbands were physically or mentally
disabled or imprisoned.”
Much has been written about the quick successes of the mothers’
pension campaigns in the United States, a country that a t the same time
had no public health insurance, unemployment insurance, or old age pensions,
and a nation where many cities banned the provision of public money for
direct relief to the poor. By the end of the second decade of the twentieth
century, state-level, publicly financed programs of outdoor relief to poor
families existed in all parts of the country. Mothers’ pensions in fact were
the precursors of the A d to Dependent Children Program, which became
federal law during the New Deal as part of the Social Security Act.

”See for example, ’Molly Ladd-Taylor, A12%ther-Work:Women, Child Welfa7-eand the

State, 1890-1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), Chapters 1,3. Borrowing from
Ladd-Taylor, I use the term progressive maternalism to refer to those women who used the
politics of maternalism to expand the welfare state.
“Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and ,Wethers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in
the United States (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), 466,426.
“U. S. Children’s Bureau, Laws Relating t o “,Wethers' Pensions” in the United States,
Canada, Denmark, a n d N m Zealand Legal Series No. 4, Bureau Publication No. 63, Compiled
by Laura A. Thompson (Washington D.C.: U S . Government Printing Office, 1919), 12.
Reconsidering Schools and the American Welfare State 517

T h e quick success of the widows’ pension campaigns, was a triumph

of mobilization that made effective use of popular norms about women’s
roles and the innocence of children. Such rhetoric, which appealed to
traditional ideals of motherhood in order to promote something much less
traditional, state-funded aid to poor families, typified middle-class women’s
efforts t o build the early American welfare state.” T h e organizations
spearheading the fight against women and children’s sweated labor, the
National Consumers League (NCL) and the National Child Labor Committee
(NCLC), also dominated by women, made use of similar appeals. With
child labor inextricably connected to the struggles for economic survival in
immigrant communities, women in the anti-sweating campaign also tapped
into the growing concern about gender, class, and the immigrant problem.
For example, they argued that the elimination of homework in the garment
trades would help immigrant women become good mothers.
In emphasizing maternalist ideals, women reformers reflected their
own traditional convictions about gender roles and family life but they also
proved to be strategic politicians. Like politicians everywhere, American
women reformers framed their arguments in order to tap into the cultural
understandings of their audiences. Studying how activists campaigned for
increased government responsibility in the Progressive Era reminds us that
while political and cultural values are deeply rooted and can affect political
developments, their meanings are not fixed and, as political scientist Sidney
Tarrow argues, cannot be divorced from agency and strategy. Social
movements are not “merely cognitive message centers” about the culture.
Their meanings are constructed in the context of specific social and political
interactions as activists try to make use of, but also adapt, their political
rhetoric in light of the power structure, the forces of opposition, as well as
the values of their s ~ p p o r t e r s . ’ ~
In Europe and the United States, women knew that their participation
in the political arena flew in the face of conventional norms. O n both sides
of the Atlantic, concentrating on issues already associated with traditional
women’s roles lessened the impact of that challenge. T h e politics of
maternalism, however, figured more prominently in America because social
and political circumstances made it particularly hard to build a welfare state.

“Linda Gordon, Pitied Brit N o t Entitled: Siiigle 1Tfother.rand the Histoiy o f Weljare (New
York: ’I‘he Free Press, 1994); Ladd Taylor, ,Tlother- Work;Kathryn Kish M a r , “Historical
Foundations of Women’s Power in the Creation of the Welfare State,” in illotberf of a Neu,
World:Matemalist Politicsand the 07igins of the Wesfare State, ed. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel
(New York: Routledge, 1993), 43-49.
“’Myanalysis of the strategic ways that social and political activists name injustices and
propose solutions, by “finding symbols that are familiar enough to mobilize people” (1 IY), is
most heavily influenced by Sidney ‘Tarrow, Pou’er in i2/lozwnent: Social iVovements, Collective
Actzoiz and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Chapter 7 .
518 Histoly of Education Quarterly

Especially before the Great Depression, American reformers confronted a

weak tradition of state spending for social welfare, hostile courts that unlike
Europe had enormous power to stymie the growth of the regulatory state,
and a business community that wielded power virtually unopposed. Moreover,
American reformers had few allies among organized labor; wary of government
regulations, the labor movement preferred to rely on the power of unions,
not the state, to limit corporate power. These circumstances encouraged
progressive activists to rely on arguments about the special needs of women
and children in campaigning for government guarantees to the poor.Z0
Mobilizing support for public poor relief and child-labor legislation,
women in the early decades of the twentieth century not only appealed to
the popularity of motherhood, they also exploited America’s unique
commitment to education. Though the liberal consensus surrounding
education, so well described by David Labaree, grew in the early twentieth
century, few Americans in positions of influence believed that all children
ought to have equal access to education. Only the most progressive believed
that most women could or should be as educated as men or that immigrants
were college material. Native-born white Americans remained deeply dlvided
as to whether African Americans, Asians, and Indians should be educated
at all beyond minimal levels, and few supported racial integration of the
schools.z1Nevertheless, large numbers of middle-class and elite Americans,
particularly in the urban North, were convinced that widespread access to
schooling for the white working class was central to the nation’s success.
Universal public education would be a vehicle for nation bddmg, disseminating
national values in a country continually faced with the absorption of
newcomers, a country of ethnic and deep racial divisions. Moreover educational
access would ensure a t least some economic opportunity for immigrants
and perhaps much greater success for their children. My purpose here is
not to rehearse the well-known history of education and the Americanization
of the immigrant; it is to show how many American social activists in the
early part of the twentieth century, particularly the progressive maternalists,
successfully appealed to these middle-class norms about the right to and
need for schooling in order to foster support for other government programs.
Though most recent histories of the progressive maternalists and the
welfare state have largely ignored schooling, Gwendolyn Mink, in her
excellent analysis of the mothers’ pensions movement rightly emphasize

?“Foran elaboration of this comparison, see Miriam Cohen and Michael P. Hanagan,
“The Politics of Gender in the Making of the American Welfare State in England, France
and the United States,”Joumal of Social Histoiy 24 (Spring 1991): 469-84. See also Sklar,
“Historical Foundations of Women’s Power in the Creation of the Welfare State,” 43-93.
“Labaree, How t o Szccceed in School, Chapter 1; Roger M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conjicting
virions of Citizenship in U. S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 2463-2469.
See also Katznelson and Weir, Schoolingfor All, Chapter 7 .
Reconsidering Schools and the American Welfare State 519

the value that American matemahsts, in contrast to their European counterparts,

placed on schoohg. Mink argues that in addition to the American preference
for educational rather than social entitlement programs, the interest in
schooling was part of an elite cultural strategy that lay behind the various
social service programs. Just as maternalists designed mothers’ pension
programs to encourage good mothering, they also tried to get immigrant
girls into the public school classrooms so they could learn white, elite values
regarding mothering.”
A broad coalition of maternalist reformers and organizations certainly
supported compulsory education, however, their priorities differed. Educators
such as Frances Kellor focused on schooling as critical to the assimilation
process. But in the case of Florence Kelley, Executive Director of the
National Consumers League, whose lifelong priority was the eradication
of all forms of sweated labor, including chld labor, the emphasis on immigrant
education was part of a different social and political project. While all
maternalists sought to help the poor by spreading dominant norms about
family life, social progressives interested in building a welfare state also
challenged some important elite ideals, in particular, a hostility to government
responsibility for social welfare. T o legitimize both government relief
programs and state regulation of the workplace, progressive maternalists
appealed to another widely shared value, already codified in state laws-
that is, the government’s responsibility for ensuring educational opportunity.
Promoting mothers’ pensions as a vehicle for advancing education
exemplifies this strategy. At the Third New York City Conference on
Charities and Corrections in 1912, the majority report of the Committee
on Governmental Aid to Widows recommended state-funded mothers’
pensions. It argued that poor children should be kept with their mothers,
that private charities could no longer administer enough relief to ensure
that this was possible, and that “through the enforcement of the compulsory
education act, the State or the political divisions of the State are rendered
responsible for the proper support of dependent families in which children
of school age are found.””
T w o years later, T h e New York State Commission on Relief for
Widowed Mothers took up the same argument when it recommended a

>‘GwendolynMink, The Wages of Mothel-hood, Ineqiialiy in the Welfare State, 191 7-1942
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 78. In his history of the American welfare state,
Michael Kaa,whose early work focused on the development of public schooling, not surprisingly,
points out that interest in compulsory education, like the promotion of mothers’ pensions was
part of larger progressive social reform agenda of “saving children.” Katz, In the Shadow of the
Poorhouse, 130. For an excellent discussion of how the anti-child labor crusade tits into the
larger program of saving children see Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Chmging
Social Value of Childmu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, 2nd. ed.), Chapter 3.
”Third New York City Conference of Charities and Corrections, Proceedings (Albany,
N.Y.: J.B. Lyon, 1912), 95.
520 Histov of Education Quarterly

state pension law. Declaring that pensions for widows did not represent
outright gfts to poor adults, somethmg they knew many Americans opposed,
they proposed the relief as an extension of the American commitment to
educate children:

T h e duty of the State of New York to alleviate the condition of the adult poor
is a debatable question, but that it is morally obligated to care for the dependent
child cannot be doubted. This principle has always been recognized by our
government; indeed, it is but the counterpart of its right to compel all children
to be educated in the public schools.Therefore, the purpose [of widows’ pensions]
is not to impose any new duty upon the State, but rather, to bring the performance
of an established and inherent standard of efficiency and adequacy that will
conform with our wisest conceptions of the proper method of rearing the best
citizens of the future.’’

Matemalists often used educational discourse in characterizing mothers’

pension programs, referring to them as home scholarships or school pensions.
Whether they emphasized motherhood, deserving widowhood, the innocence
of children, or the importance of schooling depended on time and context.
In a 1913 lecture a t Columbia Teacher’s College, Florence Kelley noted
that the movement for mothers’ pensions or parents’ aid was so widespread
nationally that states, cities, and charitable organizations were vymg with
each other “in assuring us that no child be undernourished or unfitted for
school life by reason of destitution.” One year earlier, in countering strong
opposition to mothers’ pensions a t the New York City Conference on
Charities, Kelley referred to them as “school pensions,” which she went on
to say, “is no new sudden demand. It is an integral part of the effort to deal
effectively with the interlockmg e d s of child labor, irregular school attendance
and dependen~e.’”~
Just as they encountered resistance to government payments, progressive
women also faced formidable resistance in the fight for labor laws backed
by business interests and their allies. Judges proved reluctant to sanction
state regulations. All claimed such statutes interfered with the property
rights of owners to hire whom they pleased. Furthermore, many ordinary
Americans, including immigrants, believed that eliminating child labor
interfered with the right of parents to put their children to work. In response,
progressive maternalists often pointed out that large numbers of children
doing garment work a t home and the widespread employment of young
adolescents threatened another of the most fundamental of American rights,

?’State of New York, Report o f the New York State Commission on Relief for Widowed
Mothers, transmitted to the legislature, March 27, 1914 (New York: Arno Press, 1974 c.1914),
19.
”Florence Kelley, Modern Industiy, in Relation to the Family, Health, Education and
Morality, (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1914), 9; Third New York City Conference
of Charities and Corrections, Proceedings, 79.
Reconsidering Schools and the American Welfare State 52 1

t h a t of education for all children. When New York took an early lead in
introducing factory inspectors to enforce child-labor laws, state officials
justified this new interference with both the rights of property owners and
the privacy rights of parents by appealing to the larger community’s interest
in education that had already been legally established. As the inspectors
noted in their Second Annual Report of 1887, “The Compulsory Education
Law practically makes it everybody’s business to see that it [the Penal Code
that protects children from doing machine labor] is enforced.”’6
When activists in the anti-child labor campaign argued the case for
greater government intervention with both the rights of employers and
parents, they did not hesitate to reach out to those who looked to the schools
to Americanize immigrants. Settlement house leader Lillian Wald certainly
used this approach before the New York legislative commission set up to
investigate sweated labor conditions following the deadly Triangle Shirtwaist
Fire in 1911. During public hearings, Wald called upon the commission to
look into homework. “If, as I hope you will, recommend a thorough
investigation of this [homework] problem, you will find that our desire to
have the children educated for citizenship is nullified to a great extent among
the [very] children whom we greatly desire to have all the advantages of
their few years of schooling.”” T o justify their recommendations for new
laws, the Commission pointed both to government’s responsibility to provide
schooling and to ensure public health: “The Commission does not believe
that the sacred right of parents to order the conduct of their offspring is
such that it permits them to require of their very young children incessant
toil for long hours to the injury of their health and the prevention of their
receiving sufficient education.”’*
American commitment to education not only became important as a
means for building political support for the early welfare state, but officials
relied on the schools because, unlike European states at the turn of the
twentieth century, the United States had few government institutions that
could provide social services. In a country with a relatively weak state, the
school systems, though highly decentralized and varied in organization and
funding, were among the few public institutions in place. Thus, in slowly
expanding the welfare state, Americans turned to the education bureaucracy.
Some states, as part of their compulsory education laws, already provided

”Second Annual Report of the Factory Inspectors of the State of New York, for the
Year Ending December 1, 1887, The Child and the State, Vol. 1, Legal Status in the Family,
Appr-enticeshipand Child Labm, Select Doailmaits and Introdiutoy Notes, ed. Grace Abbott (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1938), 416.
‘-New York State, Factory Investigating Commission, Public Hearings in New York City,
Second Series, reprint from the Prelimi?iay Report of the New York State Fartoy Investigating
Commission (Albany, Ny:J. B. Lyon, October 1912), 1740.
“New York State, Preliminary Report of the N m Ymk State Factmy Investigating Commission,
Vol. 1. (Albany, NY:J.B. Lyon, 1912), 89.
522 History of Education Quarterly

outdoor relief in the form of clothing and books for needy children so that
they could attend school. In Oklahoma, Michigan, and New Hampshire,
expanded funds for widows’ pensions passed as part of the state education
programs, designed to pay scholarships so that chddren under sixteen would
not have to work to assist their widowed mothers. Many states administered
their mothers’ pension programs through the juvenile courts in coordination
with public school bureaucracies. Pennsylvania’s law charged the state
Department of Public Instruction with supervising the local boards and
their staffs. Several states, including Pennsylvania, stipulated that in order
for the mother to receive aid, school-age children must be certified as
attending school. So too in Delaware, in order to qualify for aid, a mother
needed to show that she could not “support, maintain or educate her
~hildren.”?~
Beyond mothers’ pensions, American reformers, struggling to improve
the enforcement of child labor laws and ro broaden their reach, also relied
heavily on the school system. As Florence Kelley put it so well in 1905,
“The best child-labor [sic]law is a compulsory education law covering forty
weeks of the year and requiring consecutive attendance of all the children
to the age of fourteen years.”’”How much the maternalists relied on school
officials is illustrated by the thrust of anti-child labor activity in Pennsylvania.
At the second annual meeting of the NCLC, Laura Platt, member of the
Pennsylvania branch of the organization, reported that in mobilizing support
for a new anti-child labor bill, the group solicited help from school
superintendents across the state and a number of teachers, as well local
women’s clubs. Enacted in 1905, the new law, which raised the legal age
for work from thirteen to fourteen, charged the state Bureau of Compulsory
Education with issuing employment certificates verifying the legality of
teenage workers. The Child Labor Committee, “primarily responsible for
the certificate features of the new law,” and more so than any officials, “had
more clearly in mind as to the details,” met with local school superintendents,
now in charge of issuing the employment certificates, to advise and interpret
the law for them.” By the 1920s, most states had set a minimum age of

”Allegheny County Mothers Pension League Report, (Archives of Industrial Society [AIS]),
University of Pittsburgh; State of New York, State Board of Charities, “Senator William Hill’s
Letter to Governor Whitman, Memoranda of Conditions Upon Which Relief is Granted in
Other States”(Albany, NY,April 1,1915), pp. 14-16;U.S. Children’s BureauLawsRelatingto
Mothers Pensions in the United States, Canada, Denmark, and New Zealand, 13; Commonwealth
of Pennsylvania, Department of Public Welfare, Public Weyare in Pennsylvania, 19; Skocpol,
Protecting Soldiers and Mothers,428.
’“Florence Kelley, Some Ethical Gains Through Legislation (New York: Macmillan
Company, 1905), 96.
”National Child Labor Committee, “Reports from State Committees,” Child Labor: A
Menace to I n d q Education and Good Citizenship (New York: National Child Labor Committee,
1906), 130,131.
Reconsidering Schools and the American Welfare State 523

fourteen for industrial employment, with state or local school officials in

charge of issuing employment certificates to worlung youth.
While they did not create an adequate program of relief to poor widows
and their families, nor end youth labor, by appealing to the popularity of
mothers, the innocence of children, and the commitment to universal
education, progressive maternalists in the early decades of the twentieth
century had made a start in building support for welfare services and
government regulations. And they achieved some success in using the
available institutional structures, the school systems, to implement new
regulations and services. T h e powerful resurgence of conservative forces
in the 1920s put progressive maternalists, along with others interested in
building the welfare state, on the defensive. Unable to extend income support
programs or workplace regulation, social activists would have to wait until
the Great Depression made possible more expansive views of government
that characterized the New Deal.

Schooling and Social Welfare in the New Deal

T h e historical context of the Depression presented new opportunities
for social reformers. After 1933, when Roosevelt's New Deal took hold, a
coalition of those long involved in the campaign for social insurance and
against sweated labor, along with a newly strengthened labor movement,
seized the moment of opportunity to enact and then enforce national and
state legislation. During the New Deal, the United States put into place
for the first time national-level income support programs in the form of
old age pensions and unemployment insurance. The country also established
national protective labor legislation that, among other things, banned child
labor in industries across the country. The New Deal legslation, to say the
least, did not cover all who needed benefits, but the national programs were
better enforced and more effective than the state-level initiatives that
characterized the Progressive peri0d.l'
During the high tide of New Deal reform, traditional American
concerns about preserving limited government gave way to greater fears

'!Excellent critiques of New Deal legislation can be found in Jerry R. Cates, Inniring
Inequalig: Administrative Leadership in Social Seawig (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1983); Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, Chapter 8; Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled; Suzanne
Mettler, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Pnblic Policy (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1998);Jill Quadagno, The Tran.$omtion of O l d A g Senwig: Classand Politics
in the American Welfare State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). A recent, nuanced
discussion of the relationship between social movements, politics and the power of business
in shaping New Deal welfare policy can be found in Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Bminess,
Labor, and the Shaping ofAmerica? Pnblic-Private Welfare State (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2003).
524 Histoly of Education Quarterly

that unchecked capitalismwould be unable to provide for the general welfare.

Thus, in comparison to the Progressive era, campaignspromoting government
intervention in the market relied less on the appeals about safeguarding
motherhood or expandmg educationalopportunitiesfor cMdren.33Government
had a right and a responsibility, activists now argued, to regulate the economy
in order to diminish the current crisis and prevent a new one. Child labor
opponents did not rely on arguments about either the right of or the need
for poor children to attend school but, instead, emphasized that the existence
of child labor would harm economic recovery. Under these circumstances,
the politics of schooling was not as crucial in rooting out child labor as it
had been a generation earlier. Under the New Deal, the National Recovery
Act (NU)of 1933 made child labor under the age of sixteen illegal in a
whole host of industries. With the NRA declared unconstitutional two years
later, many trade unionists now representing a resurgent labor movement,
along with activists long involved in the antisweatingmovement, successfully
pushed for the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which among other things
outlawed child labor across the board in most industries. Not only did this
approach prove popular with much of the voting public, but by the end of
the 1930s, American courts also embraced the new view of government's
role in the economy, reversing their long-held hostility to regulations and
upholding the FLSA.
The arguments that reformers and government officials on the local,
state, and national levels used to keep children out of the labor market, and
the policies they were able to implement, differed from the earlier era
because of the new emphasis on the larger needs of the economy. In embracing
the use of government to manage the national economy, America's approach
to protective labor legislation moved closer to other social welfare states.
Yet more so than in Europe, the American strategy for ending youth labor
continued to depend on the schoolhouse. T h e Depression saw a huge
increase in school attendance among American teenagers, with adolescents
age fourteen to seventeen crowdmg into high schools throughout the country.
In both Pittsburgh and New York, for example, the numbers of teens
continuing into high school during the Depression, in comparison to a
decade earlier, were well out of proportion to the increase in the size of the
teenage population.
On the one hand, the increase in high school enrollments occurred
less as a result of an intentional strategy on the part of New Deal reformers
than the natural result of the collapse of the youth labor market in the
Depression. Also, by the 1920s, technological changes had rendered much
of the labor of young adolescents obsolete, while the expansion of the clerical

"See Eileen Boris, Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Homework in the United
States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Reconsidering Schools and the American Welfai-eState 525

sector required more education." A comparison of England and the United

States, however, suggests that other factors were at work. T h e effects of
the Great Depression hit youth equally hard in England. English employment
trends also showed a decrease in the need for manual workers and an increase
in clerical jobs, whch required extended schooling, yet England experienced
no such comparable increase in schooling." Because of its long tradition of
mass schooling, during the Depression American officials, as well as ordinary
American citizens with school-age children, turned to the schools to solve
the crisis of unemployed youth.
Beyond relying on new labor legislation, as they had done for the past
thirty years, reformers and their allies in government focused on cutting
child labor by increasing state school attendance laws. States raised the age
of compulsory school attendance to sixteen; in cities with strong labor
movements and ties to the New Deal, attendance laws for adolescents were
better enforced than ever before. New York City increased the budget for
the Bureau of Attendance and more rigorously applied rules and regulations
that prevented underage children from leaving the classroom.'6
Many government school-assistance programs proved inadequate, ad
hoc, and reactive. Nevertheless, along with better enforced attendance laws,
a combination of local, state, and national initiatives that built schools, paid
some school personnel, and provided direct relief to students, enhanced the
reach of schooling for teenagers.
American school systems had been expanding their high school
programs in the 1920s; by the early 1930s they faced a tremendous fiscal
crisis as a result of the economic collapse, just at the moment when their
enrollments were swelling. In Pittsburgh, South High School, which had

"See, among other things, Jeffrey Mirel, The Ri.se a7id Fall of the Urban School System,
Detroit 1907-1981 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 132; David A n g u s and
Jeffrey Mirel, The Failed Pmmise of the Ameiican High School, 1 X90-1991 (New York: Teachers
College Press, 1999), 60; Tyack et al., Public Schools in Hard Times,144-1 50.
"Census of England and Wales, 1931 Indnmy Tables (London: I M S O , 1934), 142-
150. Board of Education Educational Pamphlets, Ediicationfor Indristry and Commerce: The
We.stMidlands Metal WorkingArea (London: HMSO, 1930), 20; City of Binningham Education
Committee, 3zivenile Employment and Weyare Siibrommittee: Txentieth Annual Repoit, Jzily 1932
(Birmingham: Birmingham Education Committee, 1932), 19.
"Works Progress Administration, Historical Records Survey, Population Archives,
Municipal Archives, New York City; New York City Board of Education, Thirty-Seventh
Aiznual Repopt of the Ciq Superintendent of Schoolsfor the School Year 1934-3i(New York: Board
of Education, 1936), 85. For more on the efforts to eliminate youth labor through increases
in personnel to track down truants and greater coordination of policies regarding work
certificates for adolescents, see Miriam Cohen, From Workshop to Oflice: Two Generations of
Italian Women iiz New York, 1900-19i0 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), Chapter 5;
Jeremy Felt, Hostages of Fo7tiine: Child L(rbo7- Refom i72 N e w York State (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 1965), 126,127; U'alter I. Tratmer, Chsadefor the Children: A Histo~yof the
National Child Labor Committee and Child Labor Refom 172 Amoica (Chicago: Quadrangle Books,
1970), Chapter VII.
526 History of Education Quarterb

been built to accommodate 1400 students, enrolled 2100 by 1934. Jeffrey

Mirel has documented a similar crisis in Detroit; Katznelson, Weir, and
Julia Wrigley have done the same for Chicago.”
Abandoning their traditional wariness of federal funding, the educational
establishment turned to the United States Congress and New Deal officials
for substantial federal assistance. The Roosevelt administration, for its part,
proved less than enthusiastic about handing over large amounts of federal
aid over which it had no control. New Deal liberals-such as Works Progress
Administration director, Harry Hopkins, who set up the National Youth
Administration (NYA)-distrusted the educational establishment when it
came to providing all American youth, regardless of social background, the
equal opportunity to learn. Liberals both inside and outside the federal
government knew that because of local and state control over school policy,
tremendous variation existed between rural and urban schools-especially
between the North and South, where educational opportunities for African-
American children were almost nonexistent. Western Latino children fared
no better. Roosevelt knew the hostility that powerful southern congressman
felt toward any federal aid package that would reduce racial inequalities and
open the door for greater federal regulation of the schools. He also did not
want to alienate urban Catholics, who often opposed any form of public aid
to schools that did not include parochial institutions. Thus, the President
refused to spend much political capital on behalf of generous legislation.’8
With little direct federal aid available, school systems facing the crises
of overcrowding and lack of revenue were vulnerable to local political
realities. In some cities, such as Chicago, where a powerful political maclune
backed a conservative business community, the cutbacks in school funding
continued throughout the Depres~ion.’~ Nevertheless, the experience in
other places suggests that America’s public education institutions were
remarkably successful, given the dire economic circumstances, in getting
financial help. Detroit first embarked on massive retrenchment in education
spending but then ended the ruthless cuts, and even instituted increases,
though the expenditures proved insufficient to meet the need. The political
consensus surrounding Detroit education in the Depression, according to
Mirel, in contrast to the Progressive era, may have narrowed, with business

“Edith R. Wilkinson, “Development of Public Secondary Education in Pittsburgh,

Pennsylvania” (M.A. thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1934), 62. Mirel, The Rise and Fall of the
Urban School System, Chapter 3, Kamelson and Weir, Schoolingfor All, Chapter 4; Julia Wrigley,
Class, Politics and Public Schools (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982), Chapter 6.
’“Tyack,et al., Public Schools in Hard Times, 104. My discussion of the relationship
between the school establishment and the New Deal is heavily indebted to this study. See
especially Chapter 2.
’’See Katznelson and Weir, Schoolingfor All, Chapter 3; Wrigley, Class, Politics and
Public Schools, Chapter 6.
Reconsidering Schools and the American Welfare State 52 7

leaders less interested in expanding education than implementing cuts. But

during the Depression, a liberal mayor, Frank Murphy, backed by an
emboldened labor movement, generated enough support to increase funding
for Detroit schools.* In Pittsburgh at mid decade, one citizen’s committee
report noted that the improvements to the local school system, which
continued even during the Depression, “rank among the two or three most
notable advances since the [days of the] former Pittsburgh Survey.””
Moreover, if the experience on the community level appeared mixed,
schools had impressive success at the state level, suggesting that the
commitment to schooling and the existence of a powerful institution such
as the public school system were self-reinforcing. Local educators, along
with real estate interests, mounted successful state campaigns, even in the
South, on behalf of increased state funding. The increase in California state
funding, for example, meant that San Francisco could substantially increase
its expenditure for education.” In the first five years of the Depression,
thirty-two states actually increased their proportion of school funding, only
sixteen decreased.-”
Most importantly, while the New Deal greatly disappointed educators,
it also initiated an unprecedented program of federal spending for education,
tied directly to its emergency measures to cope with unemployment. From
1933-1940, grants and loans from the Public Works Administration (PWA)
enabled almost one billion dollars worth of school building. Another quarter
billion dollars worth of expansion was generated through WP A funds, and
the NYA provided several million dollars to aid in school construction.W
T h e NYA and WPA also paid teacher aides and cafeteria workers, while
the Federal Emergency Relief Administration provided emergency payments
to schoolteachers in the South..”
T h e New Deal’s biggest contribution by far to the expansion of
schooling for America’s youth came in the form of direct relief to students
so that they would stay in school. Between 6-10 percent of American high
school students received worWstudy assistance through the NYA during
its lifetime (1935-1943). At first, the program stipulated that aid must go
only to students in families already on relief, but the constraint disappeared
soon in favor of a broader definition of need. Because committed liberals
implemented the NRA, it became one of the few New Deal programs where

“’Mirel, The Rise and Fall of‘arl Urban School Systenz, 110.
“Philip Klein, A Social Study of Pittsbzirgb (New York: published for the Social Study
of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County by Columbia University Press, 1938), 332.
i’Katznelson and Weir, Schoolingfor All, 131.
“Tyack, et al., Pziblic Schooling in Hard Times, 81, 82.
+‘WhiteHouse Conference on Children in a Democracy, Preliminaiy Statements Szibmitted
to the White Home Conference on Children in a Democracy (January 18-20, 1940), 105.
”Tyack, et al., Public Schools in Hard Times, 104-105.
528 History of Education Quarter4

black students actually received serious assistance. For example, since African
Americans were so deeply disadvantaged in both the South and the North,
the NYA allotted disproportionatelygreater funds to the black community.*
While the traditional educational establishment feared that the NYA
and other relief programs for youth, like the Civilian Conservation Corps,
encroached on their turf, the New Deal actually had little impact on either
the nature of, or structure of, American schooling. Because Roosevelt never
wanted the federal government to assume such a role, New Deal activists
were disappointed with their inability to seriously challenge the traditional
educational bureaucra~y.~’ Liberals in the NYA, for example, wanted to use
federal funding to develop more egalitarian education programs independent
of the traditional educational establishments.Though some meager efforts
were mounted, nothing emerged to challenge the power of existing school
systems.‘8 In fact, the NYA student-aid program was organized through the
existing school bureaucracies. Once the NYA certified an institution as
legitimate, the school appointed its own staff members to supervise the
program. Furthermore, the schools controlled the selection of students,
based on the assessment of financial need and ability to perform satisfactory
work. In the 1939-40 school year, a t the peak of the program, over 28,000
h g h schools participated with another 1700 colleges receiving funds. Available
figures on New York City alone, for that same year, indicate that 200 high
schools received aid.”
While American schools clearly benefited from expanded federal relief,
by contrast, English schools did not. Efforts to extend the percentage of
English youth remaining in school past age eleven also stalled and reversed
in the mid 1930s. Although attendance increased among some English
students in the lower levels of secondary education the proportion of students
staying on into the upper levels, unlike the United States, actually declined
during the Depression.” The 1936 Education Act contained a provision
raising the age of school attendance to fifteen, but that bill in fact attached
exemptions for 90 percent of English children. Such exemptions were

*Federal Security Agency, War Manpower Commission, Final Report of the Nutiuntil
Youth Adwiiizi.~ation,1916-1941 (Washington D.C.: U S . Government Printing Office, 1944),
5 1. See also Paula Fass, Ontside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Edmation
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), Chapter 4.
‘-Fass, “Without Design,” 58,59.
“Angus and Mirel, The Failed Promise of the American High School, Chapter 3 . See also,
Richard A. Reiman, The New Deal and American Youth: Ideas and Ideals in a Depression Decade
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992);Tyack, et al., Public Schools in Hard Times, Chapter
3.
”Federal Security Agency, Final Repon of the W A , 50, 246.
‘“Brian Simon, The Politics of Edncational Reform, 1920-1940 (London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1974), 288.
Reconsidering Schools and the American Welfare State 529

designed precisely to meet the child labor needs of textile employers along
with agricultural interests.” Because the national government controlled
so much educational spending in England, Conservative Party dominance
had great consequences for the schools. Tories remained committed to
secondary school but only for those destined for university.” T h e Labor
Party, on record for over a decade as favoring universal secondary education,
mounted only weak opposition to national policies. With the exception of
the teacher’s union, few in labor considered education a top social priority.”
In the wake of meager national spending, local governments took up some
of the slack but unlike the United States, where school systems had some
autonomy, educational spending in England only represented one of many
budgetary items under the control of the county borough; hence it was
especially vulnerable to economic downturns.
O n the other hand, in the United States, if the school bureaucracy
remained the most important institution for limiting the youth labor market
during the Great Depression, so too did officials continue to rely on the
American faith in education as the great social equalizer. Thus in promoting
the importance of keeping youth out of the labor market, government
officials, middle-class reformers, and labor activists could point to the new
needs of the American economy but also made effective use of older appeals
as well. For example, the NYA, most importantly designed to restrict the
labor market, lasted only until the fears of flooding the job market ended.
Its officials, however, carefully noted that “while the second [italics mine]
objective [was] t o keep unemployed youth from an overcrowded labor
market,” its first purpose was to “provide youths from low-income families
an opportunity for schooling through the performance of useful public
work.”j4
In justifyrng such expenditures to expand schooling, NYA administrators
tapped not only into the values of relatively prosperous Americans but also
into a growing American consensus surrounding the importance of high
school education. In 1939, at the end of almost one decade of economic
turmoil, the Whlte House Conference on Children in a Democracy reported
that “secondary education is rapidly becoming, both in public opinion and

”Ibid., 22 1.While the United States was successful in routing out child labor in American
factories, agricultural interests, as in England, remained powerhl enough to severely limit the
reach of child labor laws for commercial (as well as family) farming. See Trattner, Qilsadefor
the Children, Chapter VIII.
”Ibid., 292.
’yules David Burgevin, “Politics and Education: Case Study of a Pressure Group, T h e
National Association of Labour Teachers, 1927-195 1” (Ph. D. diss., Syracuse University,
1969).
”Federal Security Agency, Final Repoit of the NYA, 46.
530 Histoly of Education Quarterly

actual fact, a part of the general educational opportunity which all children
may expect and enjoy.”jj
Such assumptionswere evident in worlung-class communities, where
parents not only expressed their faith in schooling by sending their children
to school but also made access to secondary education for their children a
political issue. Organized labor had long championed public education,
though during the Depression labor officials did not consistently take a
forceful role in the political struggles over school funding. In Chicago, the
labor leadership did not actively combat the drastic cuts in school funding.
In Detroit, by contrast, the Detroit Federation of Labor, along with other
liberals and moderates, campaigned strongly for increased aid to public
schools.j6
In the Pittsburgh area, access to high school was, in fact, a priority
for the voting public in worlung-class communities. In 1937, the Jones and
Laughlin Steel Corporation, some forty minutes from Pittsburgh, dominated
the town of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, where three-quarters of the people
depended on the mill for their livelihood. Earlier that year, Jones and
Laughlin had experienced a massive union drive and strike, organized by
the Steel Workers Organizing Committee of the Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO). Mounting a major assault on the leadership in this
traditionally Republican town, the Democratic Party focused much of its
campaign the following fall on the issue of education spending for Aliquippa’s
working-class citizens, where the role of federal aid to education became
part of the struggle. Charging that recent cut backs in education were the
result of company policy carried out by a school board dominated by the
mill interests, the democratic candidate for school director criticized
incumbents for refusing to use capital PWA funds to alleviate overcrowded
schools and, in general, allowing the schools to deteriorate.” The local CIO
newspaper, actively promoting the Democratic challenger, argued that
recent education cutbacks reflected the desire of Jones and Laughlin to keep
Aliquippa male youths uneducated and therefore “good workmen for the
mill.” Beyond the CIO leadership, Republicans as well saw the importance
of expanding educational opportunities to large numbers of Aliquippa’s
citizens. They responded by adopting the same school policies for their

”US. Children’s Bureau, White House Confer-enceon Children in a Democracy, Papers and
Dismssion at the Initial Session, April 26, 1939 (Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing
Office, 1939), 33.
’“Weir and Katznelson, Schoolingfir All, 137 ; Mirel, The Rise and Fall of an Urban School
system, 110,111.
““Democrats Challenge School Policies,” The Union Press, Official Organ of Lodge
1211, Steel Workers Organizing Committee, CIO, October 6 , 1937,l (AIS, University of
Pittsburgh).
Reconsidering Schools and the American Welfare State 53 1

party’s election platform that the Democrats had already been advocating
for two years.” “In this country,” the American Youth Commission confidently
concluded in 1942, “we have adopted the ideal of secondary education for
all youth. This is distinctly an American
At Depression’s end, the American high school now touched the lives
of most urban, white worlang-class youth, and many blacks, especially in
the North; yet its role in providing true opportunities for so many of these
students remained limited. High schools were mostly custodial enterprises
that occupied adolescents’ time until they were old enough to take on full-
time employment, while offering the possibility of true social mobility to
a smaller, but growing number of Americans.” Moreover, once the employment
crisis ended, so too did the relief programs and the concerted effort to
expand educational opportunities to the poor. As the era of rapid reform
came to an end in 1939, liberals never achieved their goals of implementing
federal funding that would minimize differences in education expenditures
across the country.6’By contrast, the New Deal’s long-lasting program of
federal old-age pensions, which, like federal aid to schooling, was partly
designed to keep large numbers of Americans off the job market, emerged
in postwar America as a very effective vehicle for reducing inequality among
the elderly.6’Speaking at the same 1939 Conference on Youth and Democracy
that boldly asserted the availability of high school education as an American
right, Roosevelt advisor and President of the University of North Carolina,
Frank Graham, declared that, in fact, “we do not have a democracy in
America when we invest $220 in one child’s education and less than $20 in
another child’s . . . if you say ‘Leave it to the States.’ You simply say we
don’t believe in equality of educational opportunities for the children in
this c ~ u n t r y . ” ~ ’
Nevertheless, although its programs were temporary, designed to
limit the numbers of youth in the job market in particular and to provide
emergency work relief for adults, the New Deal had injected the federal

’“‘Charges Republicans Steal Democratic Platform,” The Union Press, October 13,
1937, 1.
’“AmericanYouth Commission, Yozith and the Fzitzrre, The General Report of the American
Youth Commission (American Council on Education: Washington D.C., 1942), 115.
“‘See Angus and Mire1 for their excellent discussion of the educational establishment
as well as the ultimate triumph of the establishment. The Failed Promise, Chapter 3.
“U. S. Children’s Bureau, White Hollse Confei-enreon Children in a Democrary, General
Report Adoptedb the Corz+rence, January 20, 1940, Bureau Publication No. 266 (Washington,
D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1941) 35; United States Advisory Committee on
Education, Report, February 1938 ( 1938; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1974), 194-206.
“Robert Pear, “U.S.Pensions Found to Lift Many of Poor,” New York Times,December
28, 1988,l.
“U. S. Children‘s Bureau, White House Col2fi-enre on Children in a Democrary, Papers
and Diseussion at the Initial Session, April 26, 1939, 100.
532 Histoly of Education Quarterly

government into the educational arena as never before. And as Fass showed,
the national government had “linked the role of education to national
prosperity and national welfare.”64In doing so, it set the stage for liberal
efforts in the postwar era to maintain a federal responsibility for American
social welfare.

The Politics of Schooling in Postwar America

School systems, bigger and more politically important than ever,
remained as local and state entities. With the support of both business and
labor groups, school financing and school expansion grew rapidly, exceeding
the rate of growth of school children at the height of the baby boom. For
the country as a whole, total expenditures on public schools grew from
almost $3 billion in 1945 to $1 1 billion in 1955. New York City, alone,
launched an expansion program of 3 12 schools and school additions in 1953,
a t a cost of $500,000,000. In 1960, the census bureau recorded over 99
percent of American children ages seven to thirteen in school, with over 90
percent of youths thirteen to seventeen also in school.6i
Liberals never achieved their goals of building a more egalitarian
American school system. After World War 11,however, when the political
climate in the United States, in contrast to England and other Western
European democracies, turned against almost all direct income supports or
programs to promote full employment, progressives relied on an old political
strategy-the consensus regarding the importance of schooling-to gain
federal expenditures for social welfare.66In postwar England, the national
government put into place an expansive welfare state, including old-age
pensions, unemployment, and universal health insurance, but their efforts
on behalf of increased schooling proved far less ambitious. T h e Atlee
government raised the compulsory school age to fifteen in 1945, to be
extended by one year in 1947.The Labor Party campaigned for tlus extension
and favored increasing opportunities for working-class children to attend
high school. Nevertheless, Laborites were more interested in providing
scholarships for especially talented working-class children rather than
opening up high school for all.67England ignored the issue of widespread

‘“‘Without Design,” 62. See also, 42.

“David Tyack, The One Best System:A Histoy, ofAmerican Urban Education (cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1974), 275. Census quoted on 269.
“Joshua Freeman has argued that despite the general conservatism in post war America
that limited the growth of entitlement programs, New York City made substantial progress
in extending benefits to its inhabitants, because of a lefdliberal coalition that remained politically
powerful. See Joshua B. Freeman, Working-classNew York: Lzye and Labor Since World War II
(New York: T h e New Press, 2000).
“;As Brian Simon notes, throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, “the development
’

of secondary education for all was restricted and distorted by the dead hand of a doctrine . . .
that secondary education is not for all.” The Politics of Educational Reform, 3 3 1. See also Kenneth
Reconsidering Schools and the American Welfare State 533

access to college. By contrast, the United States implemented the GI Bill,

which provided for massive federal funding not only so that veterans could
complete high school but also so that many Americans could obtain college
degrees and beyond.
While it kept many returning veterans from flooding the job market,
as Lizabeth Cohen has recently pointed out, it did not give veterans the
chance to move from the working class to the middle class. Moreover, the
Bill did little to improve the lives of the vast majority of African Americans.
Those eligible for benefits faced discrimination a t every turn when they
tried to take advantage of the programs.68T h e GI Bill, as a program of
entitlements for a very specific group of (mostly male) Americans, thus
shared the weakness of a number of programs enacted in the first half of
the twentieth century. Still, with all of the bill’s limitations, it provided
millions of veterans guaranteed assistance in obtaining access to housing,
jobs, and education, which improved their job opportunities and incomes,
if not their class status; it also provided important help to college and graduate
students.” This assistance was a reward to many, if hardly all, who had
served in defense of the homeland. In the Cold War years, tying social
programs to the security needs of the country was practically the only way
to widen the scope of the federal government’s participation in social welfare.
Liberals, committed to government programs for broadening economic
opportunities, made good use of the American faith in education to meet
the crisis of the Cold War. The National Defense Education Act of 1958,
(NDEA) enacted in the wake of the Sputnik crisis, provided over $240
million in federal aid between 1959 and 1962 to enhance education a t all
levels, public and private. This included not only money for science and
foreign languages, but also for area studies and geography, libraries, English
as a second language, counseling and guidance. The NDEA offered funding
for improvements in elementary as well as secondary schools and for a
massive low-interest loan program so students could pursue higher education.”

0.Morgan, Labour in Power: 194J-1YSl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 175,176.
Roy Lowe, Education in the Post War Years: A Social History (Routledge: New York, 1988), 7;
Stuart Maclure, One Hzmdred Years ofLondon Education, 1870-1970 (London: Allen Lane T h e
Penguin Press, 1970), 143; Hochschild and Scovronick, The Americm Dream and the Public
Schools, 19.
“Cohen, A Conmmer’sRepublic, 169, 170. For an important analysis of how the GI Bill
reinforced discrimination against gay Americans, see Margot Canady, “Building a Straight
State: Sexuality and Social Citizenship under the 1944 G. I. Bil1,”Joiirnal ofAmericaiz Histoiy
90:3 (December 2003): 935-957.
“Cohen, A Consiimer’s Republic, 157. See also Suzanne Mettler, “Bringing the State
Back In to Civic Engagement: Policy Feedback Effects of the G I Bill for World W a r I1
Veterans,” Amel-ican Political Science Reviev 96:2 (June 2002): 361.
’““National Defense Education Act” Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed. (h’ew York:
Columbia University Press, 2002), http://www.bartleby.com/85/na/natdefe.html;“Summary
Major Provisions of the National Defense Education Act,” http://wuw.ishi.lib.berkeley.edu/
oshe/ndea/ndea.html.
534 History of Education Quarterly
’
The right to an education remained among the most important struggles
to expand the promise of American equahty in the second half of the twentieth
century. From the late 1940s through the 1960s,the civil rights movement
mounted protests in the streets and legal challenges to ensure basic citizenship
rights in a number of areas of American public life, but the battles surrounding
the schools represented some of the most important.” They were among
the most publicized, and victory in the issue of school desegregation in 1954
remains a crucial watershed in our legal history. Civil-rights activists stood
in the tradition of the activists of earlier generations who appealed both to
widespread norms as well as to legal precedents. At the turn of the last
century, activists appealed to popular notions of family and schooling when
they argued on behalf of child labor legislation; during the Depression, they
appealed to the need and the right of government to fix the economy and
to the American faith in schooling. During the 1940s and 1950s, civil rights
lawyers appealed, in part, to the ever-expanding American commitment to
schooling. In his preamble to the famous Brown v. Topeka Board of Education,
Chief Justice Warren acknowledged the power of that consensus when he
wrote some fifty years ago

W e must consider public education in the light of its full development and its
present place in American life throughout the Nation. Today, education is
perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory
school attendance laws and the great expendituresfor education both demonstrate
our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is
required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even
service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today
it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing
him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his
environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be
expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such
an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which
must be made available to all on equal terms..’

Warren’s eloquent statement about both the right to and the importance
of schooling is emblematic of the very high expectations shared by so many
Americans about the promise of education. This American ethos has both
negative and positive consequences for those interested in enhancing public

-‘Fora discussion of the civil rights movement that emphasizes the struggle over the
right to consume (one arena for this struggle would be public accommodations), rather than
the right to education, see Cohen, A Conszimer’s Republic, Chapter 4. On the importance of
access to schooling and citizenship in the civil rights struggles, see Katznelson and Weir,
Schoolingfor All, Chapter 7.
-‘Brown v. Board ofEdmation of Topeka, et. al. No. 1 Supreme Court of the United States,
347 U. S. 483 (1954), 10, http://library.vassar.edu/reserves/reserve-readings/histl6O/
brown%2&.board.
Reconsidering Schoolr and the American Wegare State 535

responsibility for social welfare. The value placed on &s venerable institution
has meant that Americans continue to rely on schools to take care of all
social problems and to accept the blame when they cannot solve the larger
problems associated with poverty, racism, and sexism. Neither the federal
largess towards education during the Cold War years, nor the legal victories
that progressives have won regarding school desegregation, or even more
recently, the right of public [and private] schools to practice affirmative
action (Gmtter v. Bollinger),have come close to solving these problems.
Most of the social activists discussed in &s article knew that enhancing
the opportunity to attend school represented only one among a number of
issues that needed to be addressed in order to create a more egalitarian
society. They had some success in both the area of schooling and other
social programs during progressive moments, particularly during the New
Deal. The liberal 1960s and early 1970s, a period that witnessed the expansion
of entitlement programs associated with the welfare state, also saw an
expansion of federal aid to education; such aid was inextricably part of the
civil rights and antipoverty initiatives that characterized the era.” But in
more conservative times, including our own, the focus on schooling often
stands almost alone among acceptable social reform initiatives. As poorly
funded and punitive towards the schools as it is, President George W . Bush
initiated a new federal education program, known as N o Child Left Behind,
as soon as he took office, to show the “compassionate”side of his conservatism.
As we undergo a devolution of the welfare state, school systems are
increasingly burdened as primary public bureaucracies through which we
provide social services. Once again, we see liberals malung use of the hstorical
commitment to education in order to enhance social programs. In 2002,
the federal government instituted massive cutbacks in many areas of social
spending, as Congress ratcheted up its military spending and implemented
a major tax cut for America’s wealthy. Yet, Congress also reauthorized the
1987 Mckinee-Vento law, which ensured the right of homeless children to
public education. That law requires each of America’s 15,000 school districts
to appoint a “liaison for homeless children and youth,” whose duties include
“searching for homeless children . . . in irregular residences, helping them
enroll in school, and ensuring that they get immunizations and other medical
and dental care.” At local school district offices in Oregon, homeless parents
not only enroll their children for school, but also ask about jobs, or where
they can get food for their families. As the Oregon coordinator of the state’s
homeless education program put it in 2003, in discussing the exploding

”In 1965, the Congress enacted both Medicare, health insurance for old age pensioners,
and Medicaid, health insurance for welfare recipients, as amendments to the 1935 Social
Security Act.
536 History of Education Quarter4

crisis in her state, homeless people were using the local school district office,
especially in rural towns, “as a one-stop center for help.””
While schools may be among a rapidly shnnking number of institutions
providing social services in this age of conservatism, few would argue that
they can adequately provide such resources. Nor can schools actually provide
equal opportunity for education, when other social and political forces so
heavily influence the structure of our public education. So dependent on
local property taxes that result in wide disparities in financial resources,
American public schools cannot provide the lund of equal opportunities
that even American law has required.” “Under those circumstances,” as
Herbert Kliebard has noted, faith in schooling “can sometimes be comforting,
but it also results in the substitution of symbolic action for instrumental
action.”jGEven John Dewey, often criticized for putting too much faith in
education as a vehicle for social change, understood this tendency. “The
[American] public school,” he wrote almost ninety years ago, “is the willing
pack-horse of our social system, it is the true hero of the refrain: ‘Let George
do it.”’77This history of the American welfare state in the first half of the
twentieth century suggests, in contrast to our European examples, just how
much “George” has worked-indeed, overworked-in taking on public
responsibility for social change.
With all of its problems, nevertheless, the American school system is
one of the few large-scale public institutions in this very private society,
and the public’s commitment to its survival stands as one of the countervailing
forces to the increasing obsession with the market as the vehicle for ensuring
social welfare.78Twenty years ago, Daniel Rodgers and David Tyack observed
that “Americans have eagerly turned to schools in times of crisis in part
because there are not many unmistakably public institutions in the American

-+SamDillon, “School is Haven When Children Have N o Home,” New York Times,
November 27,2003, 1. While the politics ofschooling in the history ofAmerica’s public health
care would be the subject of another study, education historians have long known that for one
hundred years, schools have served as an arena for providing medical services to poor children,
just as they have been used to feed poor children for the last fifty years.
”Across the country, the school adequacy movement has successfully won state court
judgments requiring governors and legislators to fulfill their constitutional obligations to
adequately educate their students by changing the structure of school funding. The resulting
changes in school funding formulae are disappointing, at best. See Greg Winter, “Fifty Years
After Brown, the Issue Is Often Money,” N m York Times, May 17, 2004,l; Sheryll Cashin,
The Failures of haterrvation: How Race and Class are Undermining
” the American Dream (New York:
Public Affair;, 2064).
”Schooled to Work: Vocationalism and the American Czwricnlum. 1876-1 946 (New York:
Teachers College Press, 1999), 220.
”Kliebard, Schooled t o Work, 2 19, John Dewey quoted: “ T h e Schools and Social
Preparedness,” The New Repnblic, 6 May 6 , 1916, IS.
”On the role of the market in many areas of America’s welfare state, see Michael B.
Katz, The Price of Citizenship:Redefining the American Welfare State (New York: Metropolitan
Books, 2001); Klein, ForAU These Rights.
Reconsidering Schools and the American Wtyaw State 537

p ~ l i t y . How
” ~ ~ long schools can hold out as unmistakably public institutions,
in today’s political climate, remains to be seen. T h e desire on the part of
many conservatives to institute a voucher system is an effort to undermine
our historical commitment to this public institution, and there are other
signs that public schools are becoming increasingly dependent on private
initiatives. I share the conviction of Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan
Scovronick that with all of its problems, and “broken promises,” to borrow
an old phrase from Grubb and Lazerson, “the public nature of public
education needs to be protected and strengthened.”’”For without the public
schools, there may be no sense of public responsibilityleft to whch progressive
activists can appeal in their efforts to build a more equitable society. If that
happens, Americans interested in promoting social justice in the twenty-
first century will face an even more formidable task than their predecessors
in the twentieth.

’”Daniel Rodgers and David Tyack, “Work, Youth and Schooling: Mapping Critical
Research Areas,” in Work, Youth and Schooling: Historicul Pe-npectives on Vocutionulimtin Americun
Educutzon, Harvey Kantor and David Tyack, eds. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1982),
293.
’“Grubb and Lazerson, Broken Promises; Hochschild and Scovronick, The Americun
Dream and the Public Schools, 7 . See also Jeffrey R. Henig, Rethinking School Choice: The Limits
of the Murket Metaphor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).