Title: 100 Years of 100 Things: School Culture Wars

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. From now until election day, most of our 100-year histories will be on topics relevant to the election. Today for Thing Number 23, it's 100 years of culture wars in America's schools. It's very relevant to today because, among other things, Project 2025, written to influence a second Donald Trump presidency, has many proposals relating to education.

According to a summary of these by the Brookings Institution, Project 2025's proposal for "safeguarding civil rights" says, "Only enforcement of civil rights should be based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory." Brookings also lists these Project 2025 education agenda items. Rescind federal civil rights protections for LGBTQ students. Rescind them. Eliminate the Head Start program for young children in Poverty.

Discontinue the Title I program that provides federal funding to schools serving low-income children. Reduce federal funding for students with disabilities, and remove guardrails designed to ensure these children are adequately served by schools. Dismantle the US Department of Education, and promote universal private school choice. That's some of what might happen in 2025 if Project 2025 writers get their way.

100 years ago, 1925 was the year of the iconic Scopes Monkey Trial, in which a science teacher named John Scopes had been arrested and charged with the crime of teaching evolution in a Tennessee public school. A Tennessee state law passed that year, I believe, made it illegal to "teach any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals" from that Tennessee law.

According to the History Channel's website, history.com, the constitutional issues in the Scopes Monkey Trial were left unresolved until 1968, when the US Supreme Court finally overturned a similar Arkansas law on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment, free speech. maybe free speech and not establishing a state religion. Our guest today reminds us that the school culture wars of the 1920s weren't only about religion like today. They were also about how the history of the country was taught.

A lot has changed in the education culture wars in the last 100 years, and a lot hasn't. The guest who we're about to introduce notes that the former Trump advisor, Steve Bannon, said in 2020, "The path to save the nation is very simple. It's going to go through school boards." Steve Bannon during the 2020 election cycle. We'll talk about that. We have a perfect guest to trace this history with us.

It's Jonathan Zimmerman, education historian at the University of Pennsylvania, author of the book, Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools. He also had an article in Politico published in 2021 called Why the Culture Wars in Schools Are Worse Than Ever. Professor Zimmerman, thanks for coming on with us. Welcome to WNYC. Thanks for joining our 100 Years of 100 Things series.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Thanks for having me. It's good to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Want to start with a little Scopes Monkey Trial 101? Why was a science teacher arrested and put on trial for teaching evolution in Tennessee in 1925?

Jonathan Zimmerman: The science teacher, John Scopes, was arrested for violating a Tennessee law saying that you couldn't teach the theory of evolution. There were several states, mostly in the South, that passed these laws. As you said in the intro, those laws remained on the books and enforced until 1968, when the Supreme Court struck them down.

Brian Lehrer: Was that new in 1925? Did I have that right in the intro? That law had just been enacted in Tennessee?

Jonathan Zimmerman: Yes. Most of the laws around evolution were enacted right in the 1920s, which was a time of incredible flux and change in the United States. You think about the feminist revolution, suffragists, flappers, you think about prohibition. There's a lot of social change going on. For a lot of Americans who were fearful or worried about those changes, evolution was a symbol of where the country had gone wrong, losing the plot, as it were, the religious plot. That's why these laws arose in the '20s.

Brian Lehrer: You wrote on Politico that the Scopes Trial triggered a campaign by Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals to block the teaching of evolution. That wording struck me because you said, triggered a campaign by them rather than that their campaign led to the trial. Did the Scopes verdict empower the Christian right of 100 years ago rather than limit its power?

Jonathan Zimmerman: Yes, it absolutely did. The other thing to remember about the Scopes trial is it was really the first modern media event. You had figures like HL Mencken who were calling in stories live from Dayton, Tennessee, and having them published the next morning in the Baltimore sun. They moved this trial outside because it was so darn hot during the summer in Tennessee. There was an enormous amount of media attention. Pro and con. It took all sorts of forms, including cartoons.

The whole figure of the monkey became so central to the iconography around this subject that, yes, it reminded a lot of Americans what the stakes were on both sides of that, the question of science versus religion and a question of whether religion was going to be taught in schools and how.

Brian Lehrer: Now, at the same time as Scopes, meaning in the 1920s, you write that fierce history wars also flared around the way the founding fathers were taught in schools. Sounds like today we have a lot of that going on today, obviously. What were the issues or the competing sides on the founding fathers 100 years ago?

Jonathan Zimmerman: It was quite different. When I first began this research many years ago, I expected that the people who were opposing a critical view of the founding fathers, and by critical, I just mean balance that took into account their economic interests, the fact that many of them, for example, owned other human beings, I assumed that the people who were blocking that were people on the right, like the Veterans of Foreign Wars or the Sons of the American Revolution.

I found some of that, but really, the major people blocking it are immigrant and ethnic groups. German Americans, Irish Americans, Jewish Americans, also African Americans. The reason is this. This is also a time of profound stress around immigration. Remember, in 1925, the same year as Scopes, we restricted immigration really broadly for the first time. All the groups I enumerated, they're trying to read themselves into the American story.

If you're Irish, you celebrate Richard Montgomery, and if you're German, you celebrate de Kalb. If you're Polish, you celebrate Kościuszko. These were all people from Europe that assisted the American Revolution. From the point of view of these immigrant groups, if you start messing with the founding fathers, as it were, if you start questioning their heroism, what you're actually doing is diminishing their respective contributions to that story. They all joined hands to prevent anything even remotely critical about the founding fathers from the narrative.

Brian Lehrer: It is an interesting dichotomy from that moment where they're trying and succeeding in Congress to limit immigration from almost anywhere, really end the Ellis Island era in 1924.

Jonathan Zimmerman: That's right. Obviously, these different immigrant groups are very cognizant of that, and they're fighting it. One of the ways they're fighting it is by reading themselves into the American story. From their point of view, if you start questioning the broad outlines of that story, you're going to diminish their contributions to it.

Brian Lehrer: The one that really surprises me on that list that you had in the Politico article and that you just cited was African Americans. Given slavery at the founding and enshrined in the Constitution, of course, and among the founding fathers as individuals, despite Crispus Attucks' role in the Revolutionary War, one might think African Americans, of all groups, would want a lot of fresh looks at the founding era.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Right, but let's also remember that this is also the era of massive violence against African Americans. Think of what happened in Tulsa during these years. It's interesting you mentioned Attucks because if you go into any American city, you can find a school named after Crispus Attucks. It's typically in a part of town that either was or is majority African American and Attucks, we think, was the first American to die in the revolution. He died in the Boston massacre.

To your point about slaveholding and such, obviously, African Americans are deeply cognizant of that, but like Frederick Douglass, what they want to do is they want to burnish and uphold the founding principles so they can critique our deviation from them. In his most famous address in Rochester, New York, Frederick Douglass read the Declaration of Independence, and he said, "I believe in these words. I know the people that wrote these words won't apply them to me, but they should."

To go back to Attucks and the revolution, again the declaration is obviously the iconic product of the revolution. From the point of view of somebody in the 1920s, if you start questioning that, in some ways, you're questioning everything, and it's going to be, from their point of view, more difficult to make a case for justice if you were, in some ways, taking away the document of justice.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, anyone have any oral histories on this from any time in the past 100 years? 212-433 WNYC. Were there school-based culture war battles going on in your school when you were a kid or when you were a parent of a school-age child or when you were a teacher years ago, even decades ago? Any retired teachers listening right now might be able to tell us a school-based culture war story from decades past. 212-433 WNYC. 212-433-9692. Call or text or give us a report on today.

The rest of you, are you or is your school district experiencing any cultural issues right now or just in the last few years? I mentioned Steve Bannon in the intro saying, the path to saving our country, as he defined saving our country, runs through school boards. Is this year's election prompting anything like that for you locally today or at your school board? Who has a story from the present or the past?

212-433 WNYC. 212-433-9692 or a question for our guest on 100 Years of 100 Things today, 100 years of school-based culture wars. Jonathan Zimmerman, education historian at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools. 212-433-9692. Professor Zimmerman, we've been talking about the 1920s mostly so far. Jumping ahead in history, you wrote on Politico a similar pattern unfolded during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, when African Americans won the removal of racist textbook material, including passages praising slavery, and the inclusion of a wider array of Black luminaries.

Hispanic and Asian and Native peoples followed suit, demanding that their children have a chance to "see themselves, or at least their heroes in the history books." How do you see the '60s as similar to or different from the '20s? Give us more on that.

Jonathan Zimmerman: In some ways it was different because there were different and wider array of groups involved because the ethnic and racial makeup of the United States had changed. Italian Americans and Jewish Americans and Slavic Americans who had formerly been characterized as a different race were now white people, and the people you just enumerated, Brian, weren't, but I think the dynamic was quite similar. They were trying to read themselves into this grand story.

I was born in 1961, and if you opened up textbooks in the early '60s, you still saw slavery depicted as a mostly beneficent institution that was developed by well-meaning white people to civilize savage Africans. Now, why don't the textbooks say that anymore? The big reason is that African Americans protested them. They protested those racist images, and they also demanded the inclusion of their own stories in the textbook.

If anybody tells you that the textbooks today are just about white men, they just haven't looked at one. It's true that they were in the past, but now they're 800 pages long, and the middle school kids get back problems hauling them around because there's a sidebar about every ethnic and racial group, but the critique that I made in my book is that the problem there is they were again folded into the same story. We included all these groups, but we didn't ask the hard question about what happens to the big narrative when you start thinking about these groups.

The title of the textbook often remained the same, Rise of the American Quest for Liberty. It was Jim Lewin, since departed, who had the great line, "Have you ever noticed the physics textbook is not called Triumph of the Atom or Rise of the Periodic Table?" Only the history textbook has that title. When I wrote the first edition of this book 20 years ago, I bemoaned the fact that we weren't using all this inclusion to really question the broader outlines of the story. I think we're doing that now, and that's why I wrote a new edition. I think those big questions are very much on the table.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, we jumped from the 1920s to the 1960s. Maybe just briefly, what had happened in between. Did the Depression or World War II or the start of the Cold War diminish school culture wars in those times of relative national unity?

Jonathan Zimmerman: I think a couple of things happened. Since you mentioned the 1950s, as you might guess, during the Cold War, there were a lot of attacks on the textbooks from the right claiming that they were pro-socialist or even pro-communist. Remember, there were many people on the right who believed that the New Deal was a socialist or a communist conspiracy. The other thing that happened, of course, was that Nazism discredited antisemitism and racism.

Those two things didn't go away, but because we had fought an explicitly racist enemy who imagined, again, Jews as a different and a lower race, the idea of racism became highly stigmatized in public culture.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Here is Howard in Great Neck with the memory of being a school kid in the 1950s. Howard, you're on WNYC. Thanks so much for calling in today.

Howard: Yes, good morning. What I remember from my grade school experience in the 1950s in the West Hempstead School District on Long Island was that there was an issue about whether the local water would be fluoridated and among other things, a dentist in my community who just happened to be my personal dentist was going to be examining the teeth of the children in my grade school as part of a case study, a comparison between kids where water is fluoridated and kids where water is not fluoridated and the quality of their teeth. What I remember was that fluoridation of water was argued by some to be some kind of communist plot.

Brian Lehrer: Not just a science question or a public health "what's better or worse" question. That's really interesting. Does that come up in your book at all, Professor?

Jonathan Zimmerman: Not directly, but I'm really glad Howard brought this subject because anti-fluoridation promoted by, among others, the John Birch Society, was very much a part, as Howard said, of this Cold War scare. What I think is interesting, though, and I wrote a piece in the Nation about this, is most of these campaigns from the far right in the 1950s fell short of their mark. Anti-fluoridation failed. The water in most American cities is fluoridated. The idea that the textbooks should remove positive references to the New Deal or to the United Nations, which, of course, was another whipping boy of the far right because it was world government and it threatened sovereignty, those fell short. I think it's really important to underscore that as well.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have a take tying that to the present or the very recent past of why masks in public schools or school closures during the pandemic became a culture war issue? Certainly, it could have been a public health debate, "Oh, this causes more harm than good. More good than harm." Overall children's psychological damage versus the protection from COVID for the children and their elder family members or however you want it to play out in a rational, scientific, public health risks and benefits way, but it became a culture war issue. Why do you think?

Jonathan Zimmerman: It did. Look, I think this is just part of the larger erosion of faith in all of our institutions, our educational institutions or scientific institutions. Going back to the 1950s, think of a figure like Jonas Salk or then Albert Sabin. Think of the polio scare and then all of the triumphalism surrounding the polio vaccine. Incidentally, there have always been anti-vaccinators in America, and there were people that opposed the polio vaccine, but it didn't rise nearly to the level of the people that were COVID denialists.

Brian Lehrer: What made it a right-wing cause and what made the other side, pro-masks, let's say, a left-wing cause? What aligns it with the right and the left as we think of them on other issues, if there's even an answer to that question?

Jonathan Zimmerman: Look, I think a couple of things to remember is that during the era of the John Birch Society and anti-fluoridation, there was no such thing as social media. There wasn't an Internet yet that everyone could consume. The John Birch Society, if they want to campaign against fluoridation, they had to leaflet around communities, which is probably what they did in West Hempstead, which is why it became an issue where Howard grew up.

It's a lot easier to get a message out now, no matter what your politics, but why something like mass became a conservative right-wing issue is I suppose this repeats the question, but I think our institutions have lost [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Maybe it's in the interest of the right these days to discredit institutions.

Jonathan Zimmerman: In some ways. What I'll say with respect to the school issue that I think is really important is that I think it's become nationalized in ways that it hadn't before. You mentioned Project 2025, and that there's a national campaign around these subjects. Look, the Scopes trial, it was a national event. It was a media event, but it was very much of a state and a local matter. The federal government was in no way involved, and for most of our history has not been involved in these questions.

These cultural wars around schools have been historically state and especially local matters. You take a figure like Ron DeSantis, and I think what's interesting about DeSantis is he was banking on the idea that he could make them international ones. That he could use a set of issues that have historically been local and state to catapult himself into the national limelight, and indeed into the presidency. I think they didn't have enough resonance because most people still, no matter what their politics, they don't imagine these questions as national questions.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with 100 Years of 100 Things. Thing 23, 100 Years of Culture Wars in Schools with Jonathan Zimmerman, education historian at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book, Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools and more of your calls and texts. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC in our 100 Years of 100 Things series. Thing 23, 100 years of culture wars around public education with Jonathan Zimmerman, author of Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools. He's an education historian at Pennilesse, and your calls on culture wars in the schools, past and present. Let's take a call on a present controversy, I think, going on in Clifton, New Jersey. Maria, you're on WNYC. Hi there.

Maria: Hi. Good morning, Brian. Thank you for taking the call. First, I actually wanted to say I have a connection with John Zimmerman because I first started at New York University in the same department that he was a professor in. Jim Fraser, who's another education historian, hired me as an advisor in that role, and now I'm a PhD student in the same department. Hi, John. [crosstalk]

Jonathan Zimmerman: Hey. Hi, Maria. Mazel tov to you.

Maria: Mazel tov. I wanted to comment on a current and ongoing controversy or culture war in Clifton, New Jersey. For some background, I'm the chair of the civil rights committee, so I've worked really closely with a lot of local community organizers, and one of the issues that was circulating in the community was around the naming of two middle schools. There's one Christopher Columbus Middle School and one Woodrow Wilson Middle School. Clifton, I think, is ranked as 25th or 26th most diverse city in the country. There's a lot of non-white folks that live here that know the history of those two people.

As you can imagine, it's very controversial given there's an aging population that feel very tied to the naming of those schools. That ongoing culture war and the representation of parents and community members that would show up to Board of Education meetings talking about how things are changing and not liking what they call wokeness in curriculum and all those other things is reminiscent of the stories my grandparents and great grandparents would tell me about integration.

My family migrated from Mississippi and for one, my great-grandfather never had an opportunity to go to high school because there weren't high schools for African Americans, but when schools eventually became integrated in the '60s, a lot of the same arguments or the vibe or the feelings of these Board of Education meetings where parents are complaining about what's happening, my grandmother has commented to me this feels a lot like what we would see during integration in the '60s and '70s.

I just wanted to comment how bridging the gap between past and present and how while for a lot of us it feels strange to see people, parents particularly, so involved in things like curriculum and the naming of schools, it's actually not that different than how things were happening within the last 100 years.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. Great call tying past and present. Jonathan Zimmerman, talk to Maria.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Maria, thanks for the call. I think you're exactly right. In some ways, this is why I wrote the new edition of the book. Note that the battle you're describing, it has to do with race, it has to do with nation, it doesn't have to do with religion. Really the story that I tell in my new edition is the religious wars or the religious inflection wars have largely gone away. When was the last time you heard about a debate in a school district about evolution and creation?

I'm a nerd on these things and I could identify them for you, but it's in a very minor key. Ditto for school prayer, Bible reading. Obviously these things do come up. We've seen them in Oklahoma and Texas, but again, I would argue in a very minor key. The reasons for that are that the country's become radically less religious, which I think is the most important thing we talk the least about. The way social scientists measure this is reported weekly worship attendance and reported belief in God.

Those things have gone down 20% in 20 years. We're not Western Europe yet, but we're absolutely trending in that direction. Meanwhile, the most devout people, the most orthodox believers, have patronized these Christian academies, or they just homeschool their kids. What that means is that there's a lot less religious objection and religious controversy, but here's the way I see it. We actually have new religions now. They're called blue and red.

They become quasi-religious identities, but without the tempering effect that formal religion has. Love thy enemy as thyself. We may not always practice that, but that's the ideal. Blue and red don't say that. They say, "Your enemy is a plague on the land. Your enemy is a dagger at the heart of the republic. Don't love them. Destroy them." I don't even think we have a vocabulary now for discussing these things. All I can say is, like the chinese proverb, be careful what you wish for.

When I wrote the very first edition of this book, I complained about the fact that we weren't really talking about who we were. We were just folding new groups into the same story. Now we have radical disagreements about the story, but I don't think we have a shared vocabulary for conducting that discussion or even a will to do so.

Brian Lehrer: Maria, thank you so much for starting this thread of conversation. Like over the 1619 Project, which was a New York Times series, but there's debate over whether and how it should be taught in public schools. You refer to that in your politico piece.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Right. If I were king, and we don't have enough time this morning to enumerate all the reasons that won't happen, but every high school student would receive the 1619 Project and the state-approved textbook, and the teacher would say, "Okay, let's start with Columbus. What does 1619 say? What does the textbook say? Let's do the American Revolution. What does 1619 say? What does the textbook say?"

Brian Lehrer: Get the multiple points of view in there, you're saying?

Jonathan Zimmerman: Exactly, but I do think we get the schools we deserve in a democracy, and unfortunately, I don't think enough of us actually want an exercise like that. This is a paradox that's run through all my work. That kind of exercise I call democratic education with a small d because I think that sort of activity is the kind that helps you prepare to be a citizen. But what if the demos, those pesky citizens that elect school boards and pay taxes, what if they don't want it?

I think a lot of people who favor the textbook would be alarmed to imagine it in conversation with the 1619 Project, and I don't know how many advocates of the 1619 Project would actually want a dialogue with people who favor the textbook.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. I guess, as an example of how the religious aspects of culture wars in public schools has faded, we have this text from a listener who writes, "Public schools used to require the recitation of the Lord's prayer at the start of every school day, at least in Georgia. I remember the discomfort I felt as a Jewish child and how relieved my parents were that my older brother and I no longer were compelled to say a daily prayer that ran counter to our beliefs and that the lawsuit that ended the practice was brought by an atheist rather than a co-religionist," I guess, meaning they were glad it was brought by an atheist rather than a Jewish person.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Right.

Brian Lehrer: Coming to the present, the title of your 2021 political piece was Why the Culture Wars in Schools Are Worse Than Ever. Is what you were just talking about the reason that you think they are?

Jonathan Zimmerman: Yes. I think that obviously, we've become radically polarized. Red and blue have become quasi-religions in their own right, but I don't think we have the will to really conduct these debates in our schools. I wish we did, and obviously I'm making a plea for it, but something like the 1619 Project, it should be the ultimate teachable moment. Here we have this very sharp challenge to the way most Americans learned about their past. You look at the title, it refers to the moment when the first enslaved African Americans came to what's now the United States.

This should be a great opportunity to really have a conversation about who we are. It seems to me that schools still represent our central public institution for conducting that conversation, but, Brian, we need more people to support that conversation. One of the points that a student once made to me is there's no interest group called People for Debating the Other Side in schools. When was the last time you saw that in a protest post? "More nuance. More nuance. More dialogue." That happens to be what I want, but who am I?

Brian Lehrer: I think there are two people with that sign who walk around and-

Jonathan Zimmerman: Exactly. Yes, myself and my daughter.

Brian Lehrer: -ask for the same thing in the media, though, we tried to serve those two people here, as it happens. We like to end these segments with a prediction about the next 100 years. Based on history, are we going to be caught in a history and religion culture war never-ending loop in the United States over those Project 2025 proposals?

Jonathan Zimmerman: Again, I would call it a history as religion loop because the battles over religion as we used to understand it, I think, are radically attenuated now. They still exist, but it's funny, when I wrote the first edition many years ago, I said they would always be with us because they involve mutually inconsistent claims like either he was the Messiah or he isn't, either sex outside of straight marriage is a sin or it isn't, and you couldn't really converse about them. What I didn't know was how rapidly the country would secularize. None of us did. Brian, let me add one thing about that I think is very relevant.

Brian Lehrer: 20 seconds left.

Jonathan Zimmerman: I think those of us who imagined this moment were wrong in a fundamental way. We were right that the country would secularize, although again, not completely, but we were wrong that that would make the country more tolerant. See, that's what we liberal scholars said. We said, "Religion is a source of orthodoxy. It's a source of intolerance. When the country becomes less religious in a formal way, good things are going to happen. We're going to be more tolerant." You know what happened? The country got less religious and radically less tolerant. That's what happened.

Brian Lehrer: That in itself could start a very fractious debate, but it is the last word in this segment with Jonathan Zimmerman, education historian at Penn and author of the book Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools. Thank you very, very much.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Thank you, Brian. It was fun.

Brian Lehrer: That's episode 23 of our series, 100 Years of 100 Things. Episode 24 on Wednesday, 100 years of crime and punishment in the United States with Khalil Gibran Muhammad. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Stay tuned for Alison.

 

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