| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Ward M. McAfee. Religion, Race, and Reconstruction: The Public School in the Politics of the 1870s. (SUNY Series, Religion and American Public Life.) Albany: State University of New York Press. 1998. Pp. x, 317. $21.95.

Not since 1870s Democratic speeches and editorials have the Radical Republicans been charged with plotting to build up a Bismarckian centralized state by using public schools to launch an anti-Catholic, pro-black "Kulturkampf" (p. 215). From their beginnings in Massachusetts, according to Ward M. McAfee, the "primary characteristic" of public schools "was an agenda for standardizing American culture" (p. 10). After the Civil War, education became "the Republican Party solution" to the ignorance and poverty both of freed people in the South and of Catholic immigrants in the North, but Republicans were more interested in "cultural standardization" than in "true self-determination" for blacks and more concerned "to create an unwanted cultural homogeneity" than in economic uplift for either group (pp. 11, 13, 162). Reconstruction foundered on Charles Sumner's Civil Rights Bill, for blacks preferred "control of their own institutions" to school integration, while whites throughout the country "regarded racially 'mixed' schools with as much grace as mixing healthy children with another group infected with smallpox" (pp. 13–14, 123, 80). But after Sumner's "irrepressible stridency" led to the party's huge congressional losses in the 1874 elections, Republicans returned to their Know-Nothing roots, refocusing their statist impulses northward in an "anti-Catholic political movement" that "emerged to dominate the Republican party's nationalizing agenda" (pp. 113, 55). . . .

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