The Race for Urban Status

There was nothing wrong with the American city that could not be fixed with what was right about the American city. At least that was how Progressive Era urban educators saw it. In a country that had long seen itself as quintessentially rural, the urban turn that accompanied the advent of the twentieth century was psychologically disruptive, especially as public figures increasingly linked the fate of cities to the fate of the nation. Educational reformers began to radiate an infectious faith that the urban school district was poised to usher in a new educational epoch. One of the true believers was Professor Ellwood P. Cubberley of Stanford University. In an era already characterized by vigorous social reform, Cubberley believed that the early twentieth-century city school system was on the vanguard of progressive educational innovation, perfectly situated to build a stronger, more democratic nation.

In the minds of many progressives, the city became a novel instrument for social improvement and national uplift. "Nearly all of the important progress which has been made in education in America in the past quarter century has been made in our cities," proclaimed Cubberley in 1915. Urban school districts, he believed, were the true laboratories of progressive educational experimentation. "It is the cities which have perfected their administrative organization and developed an administrative machinery capable of handling educational business on a large scale," he wrote a year later. "It is in the cities, too, that the large problems of public school organization and administration have been worked out and the fundamental administrative principles we now follow have been established." Cubberley predicted that "the decade or decade and a half which is just ahead" would be a "great period of application for the principles now formulated." The city, it seemed, offered a fertile environment for realizing the dream of universal democratic education in the United States.

Cubberley was hardly alone in his enthusiasm. "The school systems of our cities present one of the most inspiring aspects of our municipal advance," wrote historian Charles Beard in 1912, "and recent tendencies seem to show that we are on the eve of a new era." From the 1890s through the 1930s, civic leaders and academics heralded the rising status of the modern urban school system. Educators and laypeople alike pointed to a "new movement in education" and a "new science of education" that went hand in hand with the broader social reform and experimentation already afoot. Cities had serious problems to be sure — overcrowded housing, inadequate sanitation, and hazardous factories — but a new generation of public figures believed they also contained the resources and institutions necessary to address these problems. The city's advantages could be used to outweigh its disadvantages.

The early decades of the twentieth century marked the ascendancy of the urban school district in America. If the urban moment in the history of American political progressivism was, as Daniel T. Rodgers has argued, "sliced thin enough to be sandwiched between the Populist revolt and Theodore Roosevelt's reformation of the presidency," then we might say that the urban moment in educational progressivism started later and lasted longer, ultimately persisting beyond most conventional types of urban progressivism. The delayed onset of educational progressivism was especially characteristic of schooling in the metropolitan centers of the American West. Just as western educational leaders like Cubberley and his Stanford colleagues believed that urban school systems pointed the way to the future, other western municipal reformers and urban-minded politicians understood that, in turn, good schools symbolized strong cities. "There is no better constructive publicity for a city than to be known over the entire country as a city of good schools," one member of the Portland, Oregon, school board confidently stated in 1915. Local leaders recognized that a strong city school system signaled the accumulation of civic and cultural capital. Whenever the editors of western newspapers like the Portland Oregonian highlighted "modern" developments across their city — modern shipbuilding, factories, bank buildings — they consistently praised urban schools for utilizing the "best modern methods" of instruction and for constructing educational facilities that ranked "high in comparison with those of other American cities of the same size."

Urban leaders regularly took stock of their stature in relation to other comparable cities in their region, for they appreciated that perception was often more important than fact. Development of the urban West, historian Bradford Luckingham argues, depended on civic "boosterism" — an attitude of competitiveness combined with active promotion. "To neglect to boost growth and development for a city and its hinterland," he writes, "was to deny progress and risk decline and defeat." Cities succeeded, Luckingham says, not only because of natural advantages "but also because of aggressive, ambitious leaders who were intent on seeing their particular urban centers emerge as winners in the race for urban status."

"There is an art of municipal as well as business advertisement," asserted the Denver Chamber of Commerce committee in 1915, "and it should be the continuing endeavor of all of us so to elevate Denver's name and fame as to assure, speedily and forever, its proper destiny as the inland metropolis of Western America." Aware of the vibrancy of this increasingly urban frontier, municipal leaders often connected urban health to school quality as an important path to future success. A certain amount of civic pride, combined with a clear sense of the value of robust educational indicators, contributed to the spirit of competition, especially in the swiftly growing cities of the West.

While Denver dreamed of itself as the great inland metropolis, other cities envisioned coastal dominance. "Four cities," wrote Seattle school administrator Fred Ayer in 1924, "are now striving for the commercial supremacy of the west coast of the United States: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. The story of the encouragement of railroads and steamship lines, of the creation of harbors and the building of docks, of the dredging of channels and the building of lighthouses, of the spanning of rivers and the digging of canals," noted Ayer, "is one that is familiar to commercial circles. Less familiar, but no less important," he said, "is the story of the aggressive utilization of the educational facilities of these western cities for the purposes of...