Cody Dodge Ewert. Making Schools American: Nationalism and the Origin of Modern Educational Politics Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. 196 pp.

Abstract

For decades, educational historians have written extensively on the role of public education in assimilating immigrant students into American society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While some scholars have extolled this history, most analyses critique public schools for stripping students of their cultural heritage. By requiring students to speak English only, celebrate Christian holidays, study whitewashed American history, enact nationalistic pageants, and salute the flag while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, public education compelled young immigrants to turn away from, if not plainly reject, their ethnic traditions and cultural values. Why did public schools enthusiastically adopt an assimilationist function? The answer most historians give is typically located in the profound social, economic, and political changes occurring in the United States at the time. Industrialization, urbanization, and a massive expansion of commercialization destabilized the United States toward the end of the nineteenth century. Add to this the largest wave of immigration into the nation since its founding, with many newcomers arriving from southern and eastern rather than northern and western Europe, and the result was a widespread feeling of insecurity—if not outright fear—on the part of resident white citizens. Schools, especially in urban areas, reacted to these dramatic changes by becoming assimilationist. This well-established history is exactly what makes Cody Dodge Ewert’s book, Making Schools American: Nationalism and the Origin of Modern Educational Politics, so interesting. Ewert does not seek to rewrite this history; indeed, he relies on previous studies to ground his research. Instead, he offers a significantly different interpretation for why schools responded as they did to the social, economic, and political upheaval that characterized the Progressive Era. Taking a long view, Ewert notes that common school crusaders had effectively used the rhetoric of national unity to bolster support for early reforms. Yet as much as Horace Mann and others had accomplished, the state of public schooling following Reconstruction—and public support for it— remained minimal. As Ewert notes of the period, “Countless Americans still viewed