"The Insatiable Maw of Bureaucracy": Antistatism and Education Reform in the 1920s

Abstract

Like most other people, political historians are attracted to winners. Thus, they have focused on successful candidates and on enacted legislation. But battles waged and lost are just as revealing of political, social, and cultural context as those waged and won. A case in point is the attempt in the 1920s to establish federal department of education. The struggle over the department of education illuminates important components of the political climate of that decade, including the persistence of Progressive reform efforts and the importance of ethnic and religious conflict. The focus here, however, will be on examining the successful opposition to the department as means of analyzing the pervasive antistate sentiment in the 1920s, which not only hampered reform during that decade but also deepened an already potent tradition of hostility to federal power. Largely forgotten now, the proposed education department aroused debate so heated that the New York Times described it as a controversial discussion that spreads in an accelerating wave over the whole country, until every village is lined up pro or con.1 On the pro side stood the National Education Association (NEA), which proposed the bill in 1918 as comprehensive reform measure. Also lined up in support of the measure were fraternal orders, such as the Masons, who viewed it as vehicle for promoting one-hundred-percent Americanism. Their efforts indicate the continuation into the 1920s of the Progressive Era faith in state solutions, but they also reveal the complexity of motives shaping that faith. The fight against the education bill united such unlikely allies as the Catholic church, states' rights politicians, former Progressives, and the elitist, conservative Sentinels of the Republic in shared rhetoric of hostility to an expanding federal, bureaucratic presence. By revealing the diverse sources of antistate thought, the opposition to the bill indicates that the antistate tradition has not been inherited solely from the nineteenth-century mainstream American political tradition of federalism, states' rights, localism, and laissez-faire. Although these attitudes were