The eminent University of Wisconsin sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross, a favorite of Theodore Roosevelt and the veritable epitome of a progressive social scientist, summed it up thus: The role of the public official, and in particular of the public school teacher, is "To collect little plastic lumps of human dough from private households and shape them on the social kneadingboard."
The conflict between middle and upper-class urban progressive Anglo-Saxon Protestants and largely working-class Catholics was sharply delineated in the battle over control of the San Francisco public school system during the second decade of the twentieth century.
Mrs. Steinhart got Mrs. Agnes De Lima, a New York City progressive educator, to make a survey of the San Francisco schools for the association.
The Claxton Report was the signal for the Chamber of Commerce to swing into action, and it proceeded to draft a comprehensive progressive referendum for the November 1918 ballot, calling for an appointed superintendent and an appointed school board.
The mayor surrendered to the pressure, and hence, after 1921, cultural pluralism in the San Francisco school system gave way to unitary progressive rule.
The scope of the public school was greatly expanded, compulsory attendance spread outside of New England and other "Yankee" areas during the Progressive Era, and a powerful movement developed to try to ban private schools and to force everyone into the public school system.
In particular, we discuss the movement to expand the power of the public school and the educationist elite over the family, as well as the women's suffrage and eugenics movement, all important features of the Progressive movement.
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