There Goes the Neighborhood: Rural School Consolidation at the Grass Roots in Early Twentieth-Century Iowa

Notes

notes Preface and Acknowledgments 1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 87. 2. The term ‘‘soft fascism’’ is borrowed from Scott G. McNall, The Road to Rebellion: Class Formation and Kansas Populism, 1865–1900, ix. 3. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 514, 511. 4. McNall, The Road to Rebellion, x. 5. Ibid., xi. 6. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 506. 7. Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt. 1. Introduction 1. For a similar perspective, see Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America, vii–xv. 2. Wayne E. Fuller, The Old Country School, 228–239. 3. John Dewey, Democracy and Education. 4. Michael B. Katz, quoted in Alan J. DeYoung, ‘‘The Status of American Education Research,’’ Review of Educational Research 57 (summer 1987): 123–148. 5. Paul Theobald in his Call School: Rural Education in the Midwest to 1918 provides the most detailed account of these two interpretations in the specific context of midwestern rural resistance to common schools in the nineteenth century and to a lesser extent to township consolidation in the twentieth. See also Paul Theobald, ‘‘Democracy and the Origins of Rural Midwest Education: A Retrospective Essay,’’ Educational Theory 38 (summer 1988): 363–367. Theobald suggests that Fuller’sThe Old Country School and James H. Madison ’s paper, ‘‘John D. Rockefeller’s General Board of Education and the Rural School Problem of the Midwest, 1900–1930,’’ History of Education Quarterly 24 (summer 1984): 181– 199, are representative of much of the recent work appearing to champion resistance as an expression of local democracy, while he sees educational historians writing earlier in the twentieth century as adhering more closely to the antintellectual-antidemocratic interpretation . Theobald’s own perspective falls closer to the latter. 6. Paul Theobald, ‘‘Historical Scholarship in Nineteenth Century Rural Education,’’ in Alan J. DeYoung, editor, Rural Education: Issues and Practice, 3–25. The quotation is on page 15. Theobald restates this hypothesis in his Call School. 7. For a fuller discussion of this issue in the recent geographical literature, see Alan Pred, Place, Practice and Structure: Social and Spatial Transformation in Southern Sweden 1750– 1850; Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory; Nigel Thrift, ‘‘On the Determination of Social Action in Space and Time,’’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1:1 (1983): 23–57; Barney Warf, ‘‘Regional 257 Transformation, Everyday Life, and Pacific Northwest Lumber Production,’’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers 78:2 (1988): 326–346; and Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations. 8. Mary Neth in Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundation of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900–1940, 290, has recently made a compelling case for the necessity of reconsidering class in the social history of rural America. 9. See McNall, The Road to Rebellion, 5. 10. E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, 295 (italics added). 11. James R. Shortridge has identified the depression of the 1890s as the watershed event leading to the social construction of the Midwest as a cultural region distinct from the West. See his The Middle West, Its Meaning in American Culture. 12. The existence of large-scale, ‘‘progressive’’ farmers was not a new phenomenon in the Midwest; they had enjoyed prestige in rural communities since the earliest days of settlement. Provided they conformed to community norms in their dealings with other farmers in a locality, they constituted no threat to the stability and reproduction of these norms. As the numbers of such farmers increased in particular localities in the twentieth century, the necessity for conformance to traditional norms was undermined. 13. For a periodization of American history based on long-term demographic characteristics and settlement forms, see Walter Nugent, Structures of American History, 111–112. Nugent characterizes the period 1895–1920 in the Midwest as ‘‘settled-rural’’ — a period in which the mortality rate continued to drop significantly, presumably because of improvements in diet, in housing conditions, and in sanitation. 14. Wayne E. Fuller, ‘‘Making Better Farmers: The Study of Agriculture in Midwestern Country Schools, 1900–1923,’’ Agricultural History 60:2 (1986): 154–168. 2. Family, Neighborhood, Church, and School 1. ‘‘If a rural culture means an emotional and craftsmanlike dedication to the soil, a tradition and pre-capitalist outlook, a tradition-directed rather than career-directed type of character, and a village community devoted to ancestral ways and habitually given to communal action, then the prairies and plains never had one.’’ See Richard...