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Thomas Nast and the Public School of the 1870s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Benjamin Justice
Benjamin Justice*
Affiliation:
The State University of New Jersey
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Extract

In the decade and a half after the Civil War, the American public school rose and fell as a central issue in national and state politics. After a relative calm on matters of education during and immediately after the War, the Republican Party and Catholic Church leaders in the late 1860s and early 1870s joined a bitter battle of words over the future of public education—who should control it, how should it be financed, and what should it teach about religion. These battles often reflected very different world views. Leading Protestant ministers and Republican politicians waved the threat of a rising antidemocratic “Catholic menace” as the new bloody shirt and championed their own educational ideal as a remedy—religiously neutral, ethnically and racially inclusive common schools. While Democrats tended to downplay school issues, Catholic Church leaders countered with their own screed: common schools were hardly common, embodying either inherently Protestant notions of religion or the atheism of no true religious creed at all. New York City became the epicenter of these cataclysmic debates, and the brilliant cartoonist Thomas Nast immortalized the Radical Republican side of the issue in the pages of Harper's Weekly.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , Summer 2005 , pp. 171 - 206
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by the History of Education Society 

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References

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54 “Reply of the Board of Education” from unnumbered appeal filed 2/7/1872.Google Scholar

55 See all three appeals cases from Long Island City, 1872.Google Scholar

56 Appeal of the trustees, testimony of Sieberg.Google Scholar

57 Appeal of the trustees.Google Scholar

58 Point number 38 in appeal of the trustees.Google Scholar

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60 Lawrence, Eugene “Hunter's Point—Compulsory Education,“ Harper's Weekly, December 23, 1871.Google Scholar

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84 Keller, Art and Politics of Thomas Nast, 159–162. Keller paints Nast's cartoons as reflecting the artist's own fear and paranoia. I see him as being much more calculating than that, particularly given his mercurial relationship to the schools, and their frequent service to some other master. Nast played to fears, and incited them, to be sure.Google Scholar