"Modernism gone mad": Sex education comes to Chicago, 1913

Journal of American History

Volumn 83, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 481-513

  Moran, Jeffrey P ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 6444226986     PISSN: 00218723     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2944944     Document Type: Article

References (271)

1. Lowell [Massachusetts] Sun, quoted in "Sex Education," Vigilance, 27 (Dec. 1913), 6;
2. "Sex Education in the SchoolsVigilance, ," ibid. (Jan. 1914), 5.
3. Chicago Tribune, June 26, 1913, p. 8.
4. On "Progressivism," see John D. Buenker, John C. Burnham, and Robert M. Crunden, Progressivism (Rochester, Vt., 1977), 122;
5. and Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914 (Chicago, 1957). Progressivism corrects an older bias toward political interpretations of Progressivism, as in
6. Peter G. Filene, "An Obituary for 'The Progressive Movement,'" American Quarterly, 22 (Spring 1970), 20-34.
7. For a general interpretation, see Gary Gerstle, "The Protean Character of American Liberalism," American Historical Review, 99 (Oct. 1994), 1043-73.
8. After Chicago reformers introduced the term, newspapers seized on "social hygiene" as a comfortable and capacious euphemism for sex reform, according to William F. Snow, "Progress, 1900-1915," Social Hygiene, 2 (Jan. 1916), 37.
9. On sexuality in late Victorian middle-class self-definition, see Nathan G. Hale Jr., Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876-1917 (New York, 1971), 24-46; and
10. John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York, 1988), esp. 139-221.
11. On Victorianism as the sexual oppression of women, see G. J. Barker-Benfield, "The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Aspects of the Exploitation of Women by Men" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1968);
12. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (New York, 1974);
13. Peter Cominos, "Late-Victorian Sexual Respectability and the Social System," International Review of Social History, 8 (no. 1, 1963), 18-48; and
14. Peter Cominos, "Late-Victorian Sexual Respectability and the Social System,International Review of Social History, " ibid. (no. 2, 1963), 216-50.
15. My interpretation of Victorianism draws on Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, vol. I: Education of the Senses (New York, 1984);
16. Peter Gay, "Victorian Sexuality: Old Texts and New Insights," American Scholar, 49 (Summer 1980), 372-78; and
17. Carl Degler, "What Ought to Be and What Was: Women's Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century," in The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, ed. Michael Gordon (New York, 1978), 403-25.
18. For a contrary view, see Steven Seidman, "The Power of Desire and the Danger of Pleasure: Victorian Sexuality Reconsidered," Journal of Social History, 24 (Fall 1990), 47-67.
19. See James R. Cook, "The Evolution of Sex Education in the Public Schools of the United States, 1900-1970" (Ed.D. diss., Southern Illinois University, 1972);
20. Michael Imber, "Analysis of a Curriculum Reform Movement: The American Social Hygiene Association's Campaign for Sex Education, 1900-1930" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1980);
21. Wallace H. Maw, "Fifty Years of Sex Education in the Public Schools of the United States (1900-1950): A History of Ideas" (Ed.D. diss., University of Cincinnati, 1953);
22. Bryan Strong, "Ideas of the Early Sex Education Movement in America, 1890-1920," History of Education Quarterly, 12 (Summer 1972), 129-61; and
23. Dennis L. Carlson, "Ideological Conflict and Change in the Sexuality Curriculum," in Sexuality and the Curriculum, ed. James T. Sears (New York, 1992), 34-58.
24. See, for example, Thomas L. Haskell, ed., The Authority of Experts: Studies in History and Theory (Bloomington, 1984);
25. Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York, 1976); and
26. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York, 1991). More relevant to sex education are
27. Beth L. Bailey, "Scientific Truth . . . and Love: The Marriage Education Movement in the United States," Journal of Social History, 20 (Summer 1987), 711-32; and
28. Beth L. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, 1988). See also the passing reference to professional sex educators as "a vital link between the managerial elite and mass reproduction," in
29. Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 308.
30. employ modernism to encompass bureaucracy, expertise, respect for rational apprehension as opposed to religious insight, and scientific ways of knowing, but modernism is an ambiguous term, suggesting to some such artistic impulses as cubism, stream-of-consciousness writing and to others the development of industry, technology, and urbanization. The aspects of modernism I investigate grew out of those latter developments, but they partake of intellectual elements from the former. For a caution about the term, see Daniel Joseph Singal, "Towards a Definition of American Modernism," American Quarterly, 39 (Spring 1987), 7-26.
31. The rest of that issue explores the artistic definition of "modernism"; see the special issue "Modernist Culture in America," ed. Daniel Joseph Singal, American Quarterly, ibid.
32. Chicago Record-Herald, June 21, 1913, p. 6.
33. The standard work is David J. Pivar, Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control, 1868-1900 (Westport, 1973).
34. See also William Leach, True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (1980; Middletown, 1989), 85-86; and
35. Anna Garlin Spencer, "Milestones in Social Hygiene," folder 1, box 1, American Social Hygiene Association Papers (Social Welfare History Archives, Walter Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis).
36. On purity reform's interlocking elements, see Frances E. Willard, "The White-Cross Movement in Education," in National Education Association, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses. Session of the year 1890, held at Saint Paul, Minnesota (Topeka, 1890), 161; and
37. Aaron M. Powell, ed., The National Purity Congress: Its Papers, Addresses, Portraits (1896; New York, 1976).
38. "Steps in the Development of the A. S. H. A.," c. 1922, folder 1, box 1, American Social Hygiene Association Papers; John C. Burnham, Paths into American Culture: Psychology, Medicine, and Morals (Philadelphia, 1988), 138-48.
39. Prince A. Morrow, Social Diseases and Marriage (New York, 1904). On public health in the late nineteenth century, see
40. Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York, 1982), 180-97;
41. George Rosen, A History of Public Health (New York, 1958), esp. 192-336; and
42. Donald Fleming, William H. Welch and the Rise of Modern Medicine (1954; Baltimore, 1987), 143-45.
43. On the social hygiene movement and Prince A. Morrow's role, see Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880 (New York, 1987), esp. 1-121;
44. and "Memorial Number," Social Diseases, 4 (July 1913). Morrow's involvement predated the major advances in the treatment of venereal diseases: the 1905 discovery of the Spirochaeta pallida, the agent of syphilis; the 1906 Wassermann blood test for early detection of syphilis; and the 1910 invention of salvarsan (arsphenamine), a treatment for syphilis.
45. Morrow, Social Diseases and Marriage, 26-27;
46. Prince A. Morrow, The Teaching of Sex Hygiene (New York, 1912), 7,
47. pamphlet, box 1, folder 8, American Social Hygiene Association Papers. For social hygiene's early relation to eugenics, see Prince A. Morrow, "Venereal Diseases and Their Relation to Infant Mortality and Race Degeneration," New York Medical Journal, Dec. 30, 1911, clipping,
48. Prince A. Morrow, "Venereal Diseases and Their Relation to Infant Mortality and Race Degeneration," New York Medical Journal, 1911, clipping, ibid. For fears of degeneration and racial concerns leading to the eugenics movement, see
49. Mark H. Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, 1963), 21-57.
50. Morrow, Social Diseases and Marriage, 361. For an interpretation by the major proponent of purity feminism in the American Social Hygiene Association, see
51. Anna Garlin Spencer, "Pioneers," Journal of Social Hygiene, 16 (March 1930), 155-62.
52. For attacks on the "double standard," see Frances M. Greene, "Sex Hygiene," in National Education Association, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the Forty-Ninth Annual Meeting, held at San Francisco, California, July 8-14, 1911 (Winona, Minn., 1911), 920; and
53. Morrow, Social Diseases and Marriage, 355. For background, see
54. Nancy F. Cott, "Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850," in A Heritage of Her Own, ed. Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck (New York, 1979), 162-81;
55. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993); and
56. Kevin White, The First Sexual Revolution: The Emergence of Male Heterosexuality in Modern America (New York, 1993).
57. See, for example, Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935 (New York, 1991); and
58. Regina Markell Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (New York, 1985), esp. 59-63, 182-83.
59. On the Chicago society's founding and vigor, see Prince A. Morrow, "Results Achieved by the Movement for Sanitary and Motal Prophylaxis - Outlook for the Future," Social Diseases, 1 (Jan. 1910), 6;
60. Vice Commission of Chicago, The Social Evil in Chicago (Chicago, 1911), 256.
61. Jane Addams's membership is noted in "What the American Vigilance Association Will Accomplish," 1911 (microfilm: reel 39, series 3), "Organization Files 1889-1935," Jane Addams Papers (Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, Pa.). On women's political culture as a Chicago phenomenon, see Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Women's Political Culture, 1830-1900 (New Haven, 1995), 171-315. On the founding of the Society for Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis and the growth of the social hygiene movement nationally, see
62. Prince A. Morrow, "A Plea for the Organization of a 'Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis,'" Medical News, June 4, 1904, pp. 4-5, clipping, folder 7, box 1, American Social Hygiene Association Papers; and
63. Morrow's recollections in Charles R. Henderson, Education with Reference to Sex, Eighth Yearbook of the National Society for the Scientific Study of Education, Parts 1 and 2 (Chicago, 1909), 73.
64. Carl Sandburg, "Chicago," 1916, in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. Alexander W. Allison et al. (1970; New York, 1983), 925.
65. See also William T. Stead, If Christ Came to Chicago: A Plea for the Union of All Who Love in the Service of All Who Suffer (London, 1894); and
66. George Kibbe Turner, "The City of Chicago: A Study of the Great Immoralities," McClure's Magazine, 30 (April 1907), 575-92. The Vice Commission was created partly as an attempt by mainline Protestant leaders in Chicago to head off sensationalizing of the vice issue by evangelicals. Although Mayor Fred Busse was anxious to assert that Chicago was "no better and no wore than other American or European cities," he appointed the Episcopal clergyman Dean Walter Sumner chairman of a commission. See
67. Vice Commission, Social Evil in Chicago, 3-4.
68. Vice Commission, Social Evil in Chicago, 3, 70-71, 78. For the importance of venereal disease in the Vice Commission's mission, see
69. Social Evil in Chicago, ibid., 25.
70. See also George J. Kneeland, Commercialized Prostitution in New York City (New York, 1913).
71. See Mark T. Connelly, The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill, 1980);
72. Barbara Meil Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (New York, 1987); and
73. Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918 (Baltimore, 1982).
74. Henderson, Education with Reference to Sex, 9;
75. Eugène Brieux, Damaged Goods (Les avariès), in Three Plays by Brieux, trans. John Pollock (New York, 1912), 185-254.
76. On the play's Chicago debut, see Chicago Daily Tribune, Sept. 30, 1913, p. 9.
77. On its popularity, see Burnham, Paths into American Culture, 164-65.
78. Morrow, Social Diseases and Marriage, 23. Morrow alluded to fears of "race suicide" among the Anglo-Saxons, but the social hygienists were remarkably free of the anti-immigrant sentiment common among supporters of eugenics. See
79. Morrow, Teaching of Sex Hygiene, 7. For concerns about "respectable" people being enticed by "lower-class" entertainments,
80. see Lewis Erenberg, Steppin' Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930 (Westport, 1981), 60-91.
81. Vice Commission, Social Evil in Chicago, 71;
82. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's (1931; New York, 1964), 73-101.
83. On the tango conflict, see Chicago Daily Tribune, Dec. 10, 1913, p. 5.
84. James R. McGovern, "The American Woman's Pre-World War I Freedom in Manners and Morals," Journal of American History, 55 (Sept. 1968), 315-33.
85. See also Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence: The First Years of Our Own Time, 1912-1917 (1959; New York, 1979); and
86. D'Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 171-235.
87. Vice Commission, Social Evil in Chicago, 143-60, 43-44, 198-207;
88. Jane Addams, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (New York, 1912), 55-96, 191-204.
89. The work originally appeared in McClure's Magazine in 1911-1912. For a contrary view, see Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics (New York, 1913).
90. Addams, New Conscience and an Ancient Evil, 205. On the necessity of social control in the cities, see, for example,
91. Paul S. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1978).
92. G. Stanley Hall, "Education and the Social Hygiene Movement," Transactions of the American Society for Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, 5 (Oct. 1914), 213;
93. George A. Coe, Education in Religion and Morals (Chicago, 1904).
94. On Coe, see William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 156-64. Central to this interpretation of religious decline was a sense among leading Protestants that the social influence of Protestantism was in decline, because of Catholic ascendancy in the cities, but also because a recently elevated wall of separation between church and state disallowed dogmatic Protestant lessons in the public schools.
95. See Robert T. Handy, A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities (1971; New York, 1984); and
96. Robert T. Handy, Undermined Establishment: Church-State Relations in America, 1880-1920 (Princeton, 1991). On declining Protestant hegemony among intellectuals, see
97. R. Laurence Moore, "Secularization and Social Science," in Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900-1960, ed. William R. Hutchison (New York, 1989), 233-52; and
98. James Turner, Without God, without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore, 1985).
99. See also T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York, 1981), 7-26.
100. William L. O'Neill, "Divorce in the Progressive Era," American Quarterly, 17 (Summer 1965), 203-17;
101. William L. O'Neill, Divorce in the Progressive Era (New Haven, 1967).
102. On divorce after the Progressive Era, see Christopher Lasch, "Divorce and the Family in America," Atlantic Monthly, 218 (Nov. 1966), 57-61.
103. James L. McConaughy, "Moral Education," Journal of Education, Feb. 12, 1914, 171;
104. Greene, "Sex Hygiene," 918-20;
105. Emanuel Sternheim, "The Sex Problem in Education," Educational Review, 50 (Oct. 1915), 276 .
106. See also the comments of a Chicago educator, Clara Schmitt, "The Teaching of the Facts of Sex in the Public School," Pedagogical Seminary, 17 (June 1910), 234.
107. Helen C. Putnam, "Sex Instruction in Schools," in Henderson, Education with Reference to Sex, 77. A high school director of girls cited "Eminent authorities" who felt "the sexual instinct has increased rather than diminished with the growth of civilization"; the school had to take responsibility for an instinct that had outstripped the home's ability to regulate it. See
108. Charles H. Keene and Mabel M. Wright, "Shall Sex Hygiene Be Taught in the Public Schools?," in National Education Association, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the Fifty-Second Annual Meeting, held at St. Paul, Minnesota, July 4-11, 1914 (Ann Arbor, 1914), 700.
109. In contrast, when "angry villagers" in Volo, Illinois, suspected a woman of having an affair with her husband's brother, they viciously harassed her, then seized her, and literally rode her out of town on a rail. Chicago Record-Herald, July 18, 1913, pp. 1-2.
110. Vice Commission, Social Evil in Chicago, 27.
111. See also Henderson, Education with Reference to Sex, 53. On the movement between moral suasion and external coercion in nineteenth- and twentieth-century temperance movements,
112. see Jack S. Blocker Jr., American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform (Boston, 1989).
113. "Minutes of Meeting of the Executive Committee, American Federation for Sex Hygiene," March 4, 1912, folder 1, box L1, American Social Hygiene Association Papers.
114. See also David J. Langum, Crossing over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act (Chicago, 1994), esp. 15-47.
115. Vice Commission, Social Evil in Chicago, 25-26, 10.
116. Bernard S. Talmey, reply to Richard C. Cabot, "Are Sanitary Prophylaxis and Moral Prophylaxis Natural Allies?," Transactions of the American Society for Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, 5 (Jan. 1914), 41-42;
117. John N. Hurtz, "The Moral Factors in the Reduction of Venereal Diseases,Transactions of the American Society for Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, " ibid., 6 (July 1915), 95.
118. On social hygiene's educational aims, see "Minutes of Meeting of the Executive Committee, American Federation for Sex Hygiene," March 4, 1912, folder 1, box L1, American Social Hygiene Association Papers.
119. See Calvin S. White, "Some Practical Problems of Social Hygiene," [Chicago] City Club Bulletin, July 10, 1914, p. 233. On sexual ignorance, see
120. Morrow, "Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis," 674-75.
121. Morrow, Social Diseases and Marriage, 35.
122. Harriet E. Vittum, "Some Aspects of the Vice Problem in Chicago," [Chicago] City Club Bulletin, June 25, 1914, p. 229.
123. See also "Economic Necessity?," Vigilance, 26 (April 1913), 1-2.
124. Prince A. Morrow, The Boy Problem for Parents and Teachers (New York, 1911);
125. Charles W. Eliot, "The Pioneer Qualities of Dr. Morrow as a Social Reformer," Social Diseases, 4 (July 1913), 135.
126. On feminist hostility toward male sexuality in the nineteenth century, see Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York, 1976), 105-6; and
127. Leach, True Love and Perfect Union, 91.
128. Complaints about the supposed conspiracy of silence were ubiquitous in social hygiene speech: see, for example, Charles W. Eliot, "School Instruction in Sex Hygiene," in Proceedings of the Fifth Congress of the American School Hygiene Association (Springfield, Mass., 1911), 22-26.
129. Winfield S. Hall, "The Teaching of Social Hygiene, and the Bearing of Such Teaching on the Moral Training of the Child," Religious Education, 3 (Oct. 1908), 129.
130. See also Anthony Comstock, Traps for the Young, ed. Robert Bremner (1883; Cambridge, Mass., 1967); and
131. Anthony Comstock, "The Work of the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice and Its Bearings on the Morals of the Young," Pedagogical Seminary, 16 (Sept. 1909), 404.
132. On "Comstockery" and censorship, see Paul S. Boyer, Purity in Print: The Vice-Society Movement and Book Censorship in America (New York, 1968).
133. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education (1904; 2 vols., New York, 1908);
134. G. Stanley Hall, "Sex Hygiene in Infantile and Pre-pubertal Life," in Fourth International Congress on School Hygiene, Buffalo, New York, U.S.A., August 25-30, 1913, Transactions, ed. Thomas A. Storey (5 vols.; Buffalo, 1914), IV, 10-15.
135. See also the speech by the secretary of the American Social Hygiene Association: William F. Snow, "Schools and the Social Hygiene Movement," in Proceedings of the Eighth Congress of the American School Hygiene Association (n.p., 1916), 133, 137.
136. Vice Commission, Social Evil in Chicago, 78. For fears of a growing "youth culture," see
137. Ira S. Wile, Sex Education (New York, 1912), 17.
138. R. E. Blount, "Several Aspects of the Teaching of Sex Physiology and Hygiene," in The Child in the City: A Series of Papers Presented at the Conferences Held during the Chicago Child Welfare Exhibit (Chicago, 1912), 138.
139. Vice Commission, Social Evil in Chicago, 36-37, 63, 253-58;
140. Ellen M. Henrotin, "The Work of the Chicago Woman's Club in Spreading Knowledge of the Social Problem," in Child in the City, 147-48.
141. For the attendance figures, see Thomas W. Gutowski, "The High School as an Adolescent-Raising Institution: An Inner History of Chicago Public Secondary Education, 1856-1940" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1978), 76.
142. Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1927 (New York, 1962), 66-126.
143. On complete living see, for example, Edward O. Sisson, "Can Virtue Be Taught?," Educational Review, 41 (March 1911), 261-79; and, for an influential early statement,
144. Herbert Spencer, Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (1860; New York, 1895), esp. 31.
145. On the breakdown of the traditional curriculum, see Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1891-1958 (Boston, 1986), 1-29;
146. and National Education Association Committee of Ten, Report of the Committee of Ten on Secondary School Studies (1892; New York, 1894).
147. On alcohol education laws, see Imber, "Analysis of a Curriculum Reform Movement," 31;
148. and Cook, "Evolution of Sex Education in the Public Schools," 27.
149. Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct. 20, 1909, p. 3;
150. Chicago Daily Tribune, ibid., Oct. 19, 1909, pp. 1-2;
151. Chicago Daily Tribune, ibid., Jan. 28, 1910, p. 5. On the founding of the Vice Commission, see
152. Vice Commission, Social Evil in Chicago, 2-4, 8.
153. For example, Charles R. Henderson of the University of Chicago favored the state's "usurpation" of parental functions for children with "defects of sight, hearing, breathing" and those suffering from "sexual disorders." See Henderson, Education with Reference to Sex, 34.
154. See also Clifford W. Barnes, "Moral Training thru the Agency of the Public School," in National Education Association, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the Forty-Fifth Annual Meeting, held at Los Angeles, California, July 8-12, 1907 (Winona, Minn., 1907), 373.
155. Cf. Margaret E. Schallenberger, "Self-Protection through Knowledge and Habit," in National Education Association, Journal of Proceedings . . . 1914, 435-36;
156. also Ben B. Lindsey, "The Parenthood of the State," in National Education Association, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the Fifty-Ninth Annual Meeting, held at Des Moines, Iowa, July 3-8, 1921 (Washington, 1921), 42-54.
157. Maurice A. Bigelow, "The Educational Attack on the Problems of Social Hygiene," Social Hygiene, 2 (April 1916), 166-67.
158. On the meliorist nature of educational reform, see Martin Carnoy, "Educational Reform and Social Control in the United States, 1830-1970," in The Limits of Educational Reform, ed. Martin Carnoy (New York, 1976), 115-55;
159. Michael B. Katz, Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America (New York, 1971); and
160. Anthony M. Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (1969; Chicago, 1977).
161. A paucity of personal papers has made Ella Flagg Young an underexamined public figure. But see John T. McManis, Ella Flagg Young and a Half-Century of the Chicago Public Schools (Chicago, 1916);
162. and Joan K. Smith, "Ella Flagg Young: Portrait of a Leader" (Ph.D. diss., Iowa Sate University, 1976).
163. "Ella Flagg Young," Chicago Schools Journal, 1 (Oct. 1918), 4-5;
164. McManis, Ella Flagg Young, 15-28;
165. Smith, "Ella Flagg Young," 31, 35.
166. Young's appointment to the superintendency was a compromise among factions and an attempt by the board to regain the allegiance of Chicago's teachers: see Julie Wrigley, Class Politics and Public Schools: Chicago, 1900-1950 (New Brunswick, 1982), 119-30.
167. Ella Flagg Young, Ethics in the School (Chicago, 1902);
168. McManis, Ella Flagg Young, 101-2;
169. Smith, "Ella Flagg Young," 89.
170. McManis, Ella Flagg Young, 28.
171. Gutowski, "High School as an Adolescent-Raising Institution," 124;
172. Dean Walter Sumner reply to Cabot, "Are Sanitary Prophylaxis and Moral Prophylaxis Natural Allies?," 33-34;
173. Chicago Daily Tribune, June 26, 1913, p. 8.
174. Sex Education in the Schools," 5; Chicago Daily Tribune, June 26, 1913, p. 8.
175. The content of the talks is outlined in Keene and Wright, "Shall Sex Hygiene Be Taught in the Public Schools?," 698.
176. Chicago Daily Tribune, June 26, 1913, p. 8;
177. Gutowski, "High School as an Adolescent-Raising Institution," 76.
178. Chicago New World, June 28, 1913, p. 4. Although the New World was the official organ for the Catholic diocese, its lay editors were chiefly responsible for the paper's hostility to Protestantism and the Chicago public schools: see
179. James W. Sanders, The Education of an Urban Minority: Catholics in Chicago, 1833-1965 (New York, 1977), 267-69.
180. Chicago Citizen, July 5, 1913, p. 4;
181. Chicago Daily Tribune, Dec. 11, 1913, p. 1.
182. Gov. E. F. Dunne's stand was commended by the Chicago Citizen, Dec. 20, 1913, p. 4.
183. Richard J. Tierney, "Character and the Sex Problem," in School Hygiene: A Report of the Fourth International Congress of School Hygiene, Held at Buffalo, N.Y., August 23-30, 1913, ed. W. Carson Ryan (Washington, 1913), 62.
184. Boston Post in "Sex Education in the Schools," 4; Keene and Wright, "Shall Sex Hygiene Be Taught in the Public Schools?," 697. See also New York Times, Oct. 26, 1913, sec. 2, p. 12. For a statement against the reformers' enlistment of the schools in their crusades,
185. see "Sex Topics in the Schools," Journal of Education, 78 (Nov. 27, 1913), 538. For an attack on "the incursion of the spirit of organized public paternalism into the region and the sacred privacy of the family and the home,"
186. see Chicago New World, June 28, 1913, p. 4.
187. In the national debate over sex education, Vigilance editors noted, the majority of newspaper sampled opposed sex instruction in the schools but favored it in the home: "Sex Education in the Schools," 4-6.
188. Chicago Citizen, May 17, 1913, p. 4;
189. Chicago New World, Aug. 30, 1913, p. 4;
190. Chicago New World, ibid., July 26, 1913, p. 4.
191. See Charles Shanabruch, Chicago's Catholics: The Evolution of an American Identity (Notre Dame, 1981), esp. 128-38. A less sophisticated interpretation of ethnicity and Catholicism on the national level is
192. Dolores Ann Liptak, Immigrants and Their Church (New York, 1989), 76-170.
193. See, for example, the prominence of the Anti-Saloon League in a Chicago Civic Welfare League parade: Chicago Daily Tribune, Sept. 29, 1912, pp. 1-2.
194. Chicago Citizen, July 20, 1912, p. 4;
195. Chicago Citizen, ibid., July 5, 1913, p. 4;
196. Chicago Citizen, ibid., May 17, 1913, p. 4.
197. Felix Adler, The Moral Instruction of Children (New York, 1892).
198. See also "Moral Instruction in the Elementary Schools," in National Education Association, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses, Session of the Year 1895, held at Denver, Colorado (St. Paul, 1895).
199. Chicago New World, July 26, 1913, p. 4;
200. Felix M. Kirsch, Training in Chastity: A Problem in Catholic Character Education (New York, 1930), xiii.
201. Chicago New World, Aug. 30, 1913, p. 4;
202. Chicago New World, ibid., Sept. 20, 1913, p. 4;
203. Chicago Citizen, Aug. 9, 1913, p. 4;
204. Chicago Citizen, ibid., July 20, 1912, p. 4.
205. For figures on Catholic school attendance, see Sanders, Education of an Urban Minority, 45. On the split between "Liberal Progressive" public educators and Chicago immigrants, see
206. Rivka Shpak Lissak, Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890-1919 (Chicago, 1989), 48-61.
207. Chicago Daily Tribune, June 26, 1913, p. 8.
208. Chicago Record-Herald, July 28, 1913, p. 3;
209. Chicago Daily Tribune, July 10, 1913, p. 1;
210. "Proceedings of the Chicago Board of Education," July 9, 1913, pp. 2-3 (Chicago Board of Education, Chicago, Ill.);
211. Chicago New World, Sept. 20, 1913, p. 4;
212. Chicago New World, ibid., July 26, 1913, p. 4.
213. Keene and Wright, "Shall Sex Hygiene Be Taught in the Public Schools?," 697-701.
214. Keene and Wright, "Shall Sex Hygiene Be Taught in the Public Schools?," Ibid., 699-700, 698;
215. see also Milwaukee Journal, Oct. 29, 1913, in Vigilance, 27 (Dec. 1913), 25-26. These estimates of the number of students withdrawn may have been inflated; Young claimed that only 1.06% of the students brought requests from their parents to be excused, in "
216. Proceedings of the Chicago Board of Education," Dec. 31, 1913, p. 601.
217. "Sex Hygiene," Journal of Education, March 5, 1914, p. 268;
218. Chicago Daily Tribune, Dec. 11, 1913, p. 2;
219. Chicago Record-Herald, July 28, 1913, p. 3;
220. Chicago Record-Herald, ibid., July 25, 1913, p. 1;
221. Chicago Record-Herald, ibid., July 26, 1913, p. 2.
222. See also Robert L. Reid, ed., Battleground: The Autobiography of Margaret A. Haley (Chicago, 1982), 164-65.
223. Chicago Daily Tribune, Dec. 11, 1913, pp. 1-2;
224. Chicago Daily Tribune, ibid., Dec. 13, 1913, p. 1;
225. Chicago Daily Tribune, ibid., Dec. 14, 1913, p. 2;
226. "Proceedings of the Chicago Board of Education," Dec. 31, 1913, pp. 596-97;
227. Chicago New World, Nov. 22, 1913, p. 4;
228. "Sex Education in the Schools," 5.
229. See also Grace C. Strachan, "Wanted - a Twentieth-Century Ideal," in National Education Association, Journal of Proceedings . . . 1914, 317;
230. and Chicago New World, Nov. 22, 1913, p. 4. "Sex Hygiene," 268;
231. Gutowski, "High School as an Adolescent-Raising Institution," 125;
232. Reid, Battleground, 167-80.
233. Thomas M. Balliet, "Sex Hygiene and Sex Morality as the Aim of Sex Education," in National Education Association, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the Fifty-Third Annual Meeting and International Congress on Education Held at Oakland, California, August 16-27, 1915 (Ann Arbor, 1915), 152.
234. The critical shift on methods of sex education occurred at the Fifteenth International Congress on Hygiene and Demography, in 1912, at which the American Federation for Sex Hygiene created a special committee on sex education. See Report of the Special Committee on the Matter and Methods of Sex Education (New York, 1913); "Minutes of the Executive Committee, American Federation for Sex Hygiene," April 12, 1912, folder 1, box L1, American Social Hygiene Association Papers;
235. Fletcher B. Dresslar, The Fifteenth International Congress on Hygiene and Demography (Washington, 1913). A committee member and future leader of the sex education movement recalled that the 1912 report quickly led to the "obsolescence of the old sex hygiene":
236. Maurice A. Bigelow, "Sex Education in America Today," Journal of Social Hygiene, 24 (Dec. 1938), 527-28.
237. For an influential example of "integrated" sex education, see Maurice A. Bigelow, Sex-Education: A Series of Lectures concerning Knowledge of Sex in Its Relation to Human Life (1916; New York, 1918). On the difficulty of securing teacher support, see
238. Imber, "Analysis of a Curriculum Reform Movement," 111-18.
239. For figures on the spread of sex education, see Newell W. Edson, Status of Sex Education in High Schools (Washington, 1922);
240. and Newell W. Edson and Lida J. Usilton, Status of Sex Education in the Senior High Schools of the United States in 1927 (Washington, 1928).
241. Only in 1968-1969 did sex education controversies that began in Oakland, California, and Anaheim, California, publicly revive the cultural divisions first evinced by the "Chicago experiment." See Jeffrey P. Moran, "'A Wholesome Fear': The Evolution of Sex Education in the United States, 1905 to 1995" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1996), chap. 6.
242. On American conservatism as an expression of dissent from the growth of bureaucratic expertise and state power, see Alan Brinkley, "The Problem of American Conservatism," American Historical Review, 99 (April 1994), 409-29. esp. 423-27;
243. Susan M. Yohn, "Will the Real Conservative Please Stand Up? or, The Pitfalls Involved in Examining Ideological Sympathies: A Comment on Alan Brinkley's 'Problem of American Conservatism,'" American Historical Review, ibid., 430-37;
244. and Leo P. Ribuffo, "Why Is There So Much Conservatism in the United States and Why Do So Few Historians Know Anything about It?," American Historical Review, ibid., 438-52. For the most invigorating chronicling and promulgation of such dissent, see
245. Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York, 1991), esp. 412-522;
246. and Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The family Besieged (New York, 1977).
247. Robert N. Crunden, Ministers of Reform: The Progressives' Achievement in American Civilization, 1889-1920 (New York, 1982);
248. Buenker, Burnham, and Crunden, Progressivism, 75.
249. On other elite reactions to the loss of religious meaning, see Lears, No Place of Grace, esp. 3-26.
250. G. Stanley Hall, "Morale in the War and After," Psychological Bulletin, 15 (Nov. 1918),
251. in "Morale and Sex," Social Hygiene, 6 (Jan. 1920), 72.
252. For a similar conflating of biological and religious laws, see John M. Coulter, "The Religious and Character Value of the Curriculum: Biology," Religious Education, 6 (Dec. 1911), 366-68.
253. For the later period see, for example, Bailey, "Scientific Truth . . . and Love," 711.
254. Chicago Citizen, July 13, 1913, p. 4;
255. Chicago New World, Oct. 4, 1913, p. 4.
256. Catholics too were occasionally enthusiastic about using coercion to enforce absolute morality; by the 1920s, Catholics were the mainstays of censorship societies. See Boyer, Purity in Print, 167-206;
257. Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (New York, 1994);
258. and James M. Skinner, The Cross and the Cinema: The Legion of Decency and the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, 1933-1970 (Westport, 1993).
259. The Catholic denunciation of social hygiene's breaking the conspiracy of silence was correct, in the sense that the new social tolerance for "scientific" discussions of sex also cleared the way for a flood of less elevated publications. See Burnham, Paths into American Culture, 150-69.
260. How social issues and religion helped create a Cold War alliance between conservative Catholics, Fundamentalist Protestants and, eventually, evangelicals, is hinted at in Gordon V. Drake, Is the Schoolhouse the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex? (Tulsa, 1968).
261. See also Daniel Bell, ed., The Radical Right (Garden City, 1963);
262. Jerome L. Himmelstein, To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism (Los Angeles, 1990); and
263. William B. Hixson Jr., Search for the American Right Wing: An Analysis of the Social Science Record, 1935-1987 (Princeton, 1992). Although his work is replete with evidence to the contrary,
264. see, for example, Allan M. Brandt's assertion, "doctors had become the arbiters of sexuality in both its scientific and moral realms"; Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 51. On the "therapeutic culture," see Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (New York, 1966).
265. Morrow, Social Diseases and Marriage, 338-39;
266. Gerstle, "Protean Character of American Liberalism," 1055;
267. Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York, 1925). On Lippmann's intellectual development,
268. see Lasch, True and Only Heaven, 361-68.
269. On the role of a belief in the political irrationality of the masses in this rejection of democracy, see Edward A. Purcell Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington, Ky., 1973), 103-9.
270. This is to argue not only for the persistence of actual conservative people, but also for the persistence of a generalized impulse of dissent from modern structures of social reproduction. On educators' lack of engagement with the public, see Jonathan Zimmerman, "'The Queen of the Lobby": Mary Hunt, Scientific Temperance, and the Dilemma of Democratic Education America, 1879-1906," History of Education Quarterly, 32 (Spring 1992), 30.
271. Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic, 1-2.