The Autobiography of Citizenship: Assimilation and Resistance in U.S. Education by Tova Cooper (review)

Tova Cooper’s The Autobiography of Citizenship: Assimilation and Resistance in U.S. Education is a refreshing and compelling study of citizenship education programs and practices as well as autobiographies or autobiographical writing by new citizens between 1880 and 1920. The book is a comparative analysis of educational experiences of three groups of new citizens or citizens-to-be: European immigrants, African Americans, and American Indians. The book attends to the new citizens’ uncritical reproduction of school lessons during a period of intense scrutiny of national identity and forced assimilation of non-white, non-Protestant groups. It also showcases subtle ways in which new citizens challenged dominant conceptions of national belonging by proposing alternatives to the dominant US culture. Cooper shows in five chapters and a thoughtful conclusion how these alternatives emerged in the form of “educational theories, practices, and autobiographical narratives influenced by extranational or international perspectives” (5). Drawing on the work of education theorists, such as John Dewey and William James, and contemporary citizenship theorists, such as Linda Bosniak, Renato Rosaldo, and Juan Flores, the author shows persuasively how authors and public figures such as Santee Sioux writer Charles A. Eastman or Jewish American writer Abraham Cahan were “ahead of their time in promoting a culturally pluralist approach to citizenship that validated difference within unity” (15). One of the book’s primary strengths is its smart juxtaposition of literary texts with archival materials from the Library of Congress, the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library, and the Huntington Library Special Collections, among others.

Drawing on a variety of archival materials—rare photographs and photographic records of student life, student letters and essays, and curricular records—and literary works, The Autobiography of Citizenship reads literary texts by students and educators alongside archival materials to illuminate the contradictions of US citizenship and progressive education during these decades. The literary texts discussed include W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Diary of My Steerage Trip across the Atlantic” (1895), Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Eastman’s From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916), Cahan’s autobiographical novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and his Yiddish-language autobiography The Education of Abraham Cahan (1926), and Emma Goldman’s autobiography Living My Life (1931). Whereas most of the literary works discussed are autobiographies, others are just autobiographical; however, as Cooper shows, all the chosen texts use or invoke the conventions of the bildungsroman even when the works are not novels. The book’s primary focus is on educational autobiographies, the medium that the new citizens used to interpret and sometimes resist ideas of US citizenship learned in educational institutions. In Chapter Two, for instance, the author invokes Native American student ambivalence toward US citizenship expressed in the letters they sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School after graduation, arguing that such letters point to the students’ agency “from within the confines of assimilationist ideology” (97).

The first chapter turns to Eastman’s citizenship autobiography From the Deep Woods to Civilization to show how Eastman uses assimilationist rhetoric to offer a critique of his education in US institutions. Reading this work’s ambivalence toward American citizenship in the context of the US boarding schools as institutions aiming at erasing tribal identity, Cooper shows how Eastman “strategically manipulates images of the Indian to reshape US culture so it might benefit from the ideals of his early childhood” (36). To this end, she reads the autobiography alongside Eastman’s other literary and political work, from “The Indian’s Plea for Freedom” (1919) and The Indian To-Day (1915) to his work and writing for the Boy Scouts and the Society of American Indians. Challenging the critical reception of Eastman’s work as assimilationist, Cooper also shows the challenges Eastman faced as he expressed his ambivalence toward US citizenship and civic republican ideology.

Examining Frances Benjamin Johnston’s portraits of African American...