Religion, Race, and Reconstruction: The Public School in the Politics of the 1870s [Book Review]

Abstract

Not since 1870s Democratic speeches and editorials have the Radical Republicans been charged with plotting to build up a Bismarckian centralized state by using public schools to launch an anti-Catholic, pro-black "Kulturkamp'f (p. 215). From their beginnings in Massachusetts, according to Ward M. McAfee, the "primary characteristic" of public schools "was an agenda for standardizing American culture" (p. 10). After the Civil War, education became "the Republican Party solution" to the ignorance and poverty both of freed people in the South and of Catholic immigrants in the North, but Republicans were more interested in "cultural standardization" than in "true self-determination" for blacks and more concerned "to create an unwanted cultural homogeneity" than in economic uplift for either group (pp. 11, 13, 162).

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