Teaching Americanism: Ray K. Daily and the Persistence of Conservatism in Houston School Politics, 1943-1952

Figure 1.

Dr. Ray K. Daily, 1954. Daily, an ophthalmologist, was first elected to the Houston Independent School District board in 1928 and served for twenty-four years. Courtesy the collection of photographer Joseph Maurer, Houston Academy of Medicine–Texas Medical Center Library.

I think basically the game of the whole thing is the game of money," former Houston Independent School District (HISD) board member and president Dr. Ray Karchmer Daily explained in a 1974 interview. "It cost money to have good schools." And concerns about money, according to Daily, ultimately shaped the raucous contests over control of the Houston school board throughout its history. This assertation was accurate in part; Daily herself finally had been defeated in an election that focused on, among other issues, federal funding to Houston schools. Her cynical hindsight notwithstanding, however, much more than money was at stake in the hostile competitions that plagued Daily's long tenure on the administrative board of the Houston school system. Daily served on the HISD board for twenty-four years, from 1928 to 1952, and her terms coincided with some of the most tumultuous years in Houston's history. First elected at a time when the Ku Klux Klan actively controlled the city, Daily finally departed her post with the fifties red scare in full swing and the Brown v. Board of Education case under consideration by the Supreme Court. ¹ Daily participated in some of the board's most controversial decisions, including the equalization of pay for black and white teachers. Ever an advocate of contentious measures—she supported special education classes, equal pay for female employees, reading programs, and, finally, a federally funded free lunch program for students from low-income families—Daily was a lightning rod for protest during her time on the board. ² As such, she is also a useful guide to the issues that galvanized the population of Houston, Texas, and the nation as a whole, during these years.

Notoriously liberal in her views on education, Ray Daily was a particular target during the heyday of anti-Communism in Houston. ³ As a pervasive red scare enveloped the nation in the late forties and early fifties, activists seeking to combat the threat of domestic Communism focused on American schools. ⁴ Houston was no exception. Local civic organizations mobilized to police Houston's educational institutions in search of subversive textbooks, instructors, and administrators and actively campaigned for conservative representation on the school system's administrative body. These groups opposed Daily specifically because she had a history of supporting "progressive education," generally defined as an "educational philosophy that focused on relativism and the cultivation of problem solving." Innocuous as this focus may have seemed to its proponents, attacking programs that were subsumed beneath the "progressive" rubric became a favored tactic of community anti-Communists in the 1950s. The term "progressive education" was broadly applied, in the cultural lexicon of the times, to a whole range of activities, including the use of educational materials provided by the United Nations Educational, Social, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and support for federal educational funding. Daily's progressive stance encouraged her conservative opponents in Houston to accuse her of supporting socialist teaching in the schools. In spite of her history of effective leadership, her progressive opinions helped instigate the final and successful campaign against her reelection to the school board in 1952. ⁵

An assessment of Daily's career on the school board, however, reveals that efforts against her had a longer history, one that exposes a rarely discussed tradition of conservatism in American culture. ⁶ Historian of McCarthyism Richard Fried contends that anti-Communism endured in the United States because it emerged from "a deeply rooted cluster of values shared by much of American society." Fried expands the boundaries of the red scare of the 1950s to expose its cultural roots in the economic upheaval of the 1930s and American bewilderment at the "social and political changes at work...