“One Community's Total War Against Prejudice”: The Springfield Plan Revisited

Abstract

This article examines one community's attempt to educate for democratic citizenship during World War II through a community-wide tolerance program known as “The Springfield Plan.” Through the advocacy of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, Superintendent John Granrud, and Teachers College Associate Professor Clyde R. Miller, the Springfield Plan became the most well-publicized intercultural educational curriculum in the 1940s, talked about and emulated by school districts across the country and into Canada. I situate the ideological origins of the program in the work of Miller's Institute for Propaganda Analysis in the late 1930s, analyze the curriculum frameworks and the program's dissemination to other school districts in the 1940s, and chronicle its demise during the red-baiting of progressive and intercultural educators in the late 1940s. The rise and fall of the Springfield Plan provides a historical window into the role of the media and advocacy efforts in the implementation and dissemination of a citizenship curriculum as well as the impact of the changing local and national political context on the promotion (and suppression) of diversity work in the schools.