Book Review

During the first third of the twentieth century, rural southerners were America's poorest people, and they attracted the attention of several generations of reformers, social engineers, and state interventionists. In this important case study of Tennessee, Mary S. Hoffschwelle covers the familiar ground of Progressive Era social reform. Through a regional educational campaign that brought an enlarged school bureaucracy, an entirely new approach emerged toward public schools after 1900. Following the lead of other state-run bureaucracies, Tennessee's school leaders rebuilt the physical plant of white schools. School architects such as Fletcher Bascom Dresslar, a national leader in architectural standardization, sought a wholly new physical landscape of rural education that paid particular attention to rural reform. School consolidation—the elimination of traditional one-room schools and the construction of modernized school facilities—became an important agent of change, and Hoffschwelle explains how this process took hold in Tennessee during World War I.

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