Approaching the 20th Century

            In order to approach this period of national culture disunity and historical fragmentation around the Civil War, it is important to remember that contention between Northern and Southern sections of the country over how to interpret certain cultural aspects present within the nation was nothing new. “The cultural authority that Protestant, New England-based textbook writers might wield was already troubling some white southerners by the 1840s. They called for boycotts, complaining that textbooks showed insufficient respect for the Southern way of life and misrepresented its central economic institution, slavery.”[1] What was new, however, were the influential roles that textbook manufacturers and a Southern audience came to play in the crafting of national culture and memory as the United States entered the twentieth century.

            During the Reconstruction that followed the years of Civil War, the United States underwent one of its largest expansions in public education – a time that would see the percentage of Southern enrollment in public schools nearly double from 1871 to 1890.[2] With an expanding Southern audience also came a resurgence in the conflict over how to interpret and contextualize America’s past for its students. It soon became clear that “at the same time Republicans were establishing schools, Reconstruction also introduced political ideology that conservative Whites found alienating and threatening.”[3] In response to this, political activist groups began to form around efforts to promote more favorable interpretations of history for their students.

[1] Joseph Moreau, Schoolbook Nation: Conflicts over American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003) 19.

[2] Ebd, 60.

[3] Ebd, 61.

            On the other side of the equation, the industry around textbook publishing began to shift under the weight of dramatically increased and diversifying demand. In 1890, the five leading textbook publishers in the country “merged their textbook operations to form the American Book Company (ABC). Capitalized with five million dollars and incorporated in Jew Jersey (for its liberal antitrust laws), ABC instantly dominated the textbook market and soon swallowed up two dozen smaller companies…” Some even “called ABC’s monopoly more complete than Standard Oil’s. And it was all the more insidious because the publisher might gain de facto control of student curricula and, with them, the minds of future citizens.”[1]

            To compound the agency now enjoyed by the publishing companies, Southern States’ legislatures, led by Texas and Virginia, began adopting state-sponsored educational boards of review. These school boards were initially established to combat the rampant corruption and confusion present within the textbook buying system in which innumerable salespeople would be let loose to negotiate (often through bribes and favors) for individual business deals directly with the schools or local government officials nationwide – “but, once established, review boards and the public hearings they held also provided an arena for different social groups to spar over what sort of books children should read. Activists lobbied board members, who took their recommendations under advisement when selecting books.”[2] This meant that publishers now had the ability to make larger sales from a smaller number of meetings, but they would have to meet the approval of the review boards and the political leanings of their markets.

          The differences that emerged between the books written for Northern audiences and those written for Southern audiences were stark – yet reminiscent of themes which plagued the antebellum nation with conflict. The issue of how to view the institution of slavery was still contententious. However, it is important to remember that the debates around education revolved around the central questions which have always existed around public education in the United States: “what sort of national identity should schools foster? Can the stories of minority groups, however defined, be integrated into classrooms and textbooks without upsetting the ‘main story’ of American history? Do competing versions of our past, sometimes taught in socially segregated schools, threated national unity?”[3]

[1] Joseph Moreau, Schoolbook Nation, 68-69.

[2] Ebd, 21.

[3] Ebd, 16.