The People's Classroom: American Modernism and the Struggle for Democratic Education, 1860-1940.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the struggle for democratic education in California among public intellectuals, labor groups, and education reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that this struggle played out not merely within universities, but also through what I call “people’s classrooms”: alternative cultural and political formations, from Yosemite to Berkeley, that operated in and around institutions of higher learning. The clamor of populist activists for educational access represented a vernacular embrace of the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, which reserved federal lands to the states for use in establishing public colleges and universities offering education in “agriculture and the mechanic arts.” Eventually, the fierce populist positions of the 1870s were adapted and softened—but also made hegemonic—by middlebrow public intellectuals like Charles Keeler, Mary Austin, and William Ritter. Though this struggle between competing visions of public education brought the University of California to the brink of collapse in the 1870s, I argue that it produced a major current of American modernism that historians have largely ignored. This movement—which developed well outside the older centers of intellectual power, artistic training, and commercial publishing—pioneered alternative intellectual practices, approaches to citizenship, and ways of experiencing the natural world. Rather than inventing radically new aesthetic practices, these Californians were involved in a Gramscian “war of position” wherein the tools of power—namely institutions, mass media, environmental resources, and market capitalism—were challenged and redeployed to serve alternative publics and political agendas, particularly in the wake of the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906.