Category: HISTORY

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries American labor fought a sustained battle against American capitalists over who should determine the wages, hours, and working conditions in America’s booming factories—ownership or the workers. Battle tactics included dueling messaging in friendly publications, lobbying for favorable laws, and confrontations between strikes and strikebreakers. As is well-known, the struggle grew intense and violent during labor protests like the 1886 rally at Haymarket Square and the 1892 Homestead Strike. Less well known is labor activists’ occasional resort to sabotage of anti-union business establishments. In 1910, the Los Angeles Times, a strident anti-union voice in a staunch anti-union state, was a target of domestic violence that took the lives of 21 of its employees. 

Why the LA Times Was Targeted

During a highly successful career, the newspaper’s owner, Harrison Gray Otis, had become the political enemy of all unions and a symbol of capitalistic intransigence to worker rights. A delegate to the 1860 Republican Convention, Otis served with distinction in the Civil War, rising to the rank of brevet lieutenant colonel. Following the conflict, he moved to Los Angeles, seeking his fortune in the newspaper business. He landed a job, making $15 a month with the LA Times, but soon saved enough money to purchase the struggling paper with a partner’s help. Otis was not a man willing to share power. He bought out his partner and instituted dictatorial control of the Times. Otis and LA’s other printers were virulently anti-union. Along with other merchants, they organized the Merchants and Manufacturers Association to ensure they remained “masters of our own business.” Members promised not to hire union members, to use lockouts and blacklists to break the unions, and to provide financial support for their fellow members if their workers struck.

When the typographical worker’s union struck LA’s printers in 1890 in protest of wage cuts, Otis joined the other LA papers to break the back of the union. His fellow printers caved, but not Otis. When the union abandoned the fight in 1895, the LA Times became the only non-union shop in the LA newspaper business. Otis became a symbol of anti-union capitalists unwilling to negotiate wages or working conditions. 

The Times Owner’s Swift Response

In the early morning hours of October 1, 1910, a bomb destroyed the LA Times building, killing 21 workers and injuring many others. While the destroyed plant still smoldered and authorities searched for survivors and clues to what happened, Otis persuaded another printer to run an abbreviated edition of the Times with headlines proclaiming Union Bombs Wreck the Times. Police discovered an unexploded bomb at his residence the same day, which cemented Otis’s view that unions were attacking him and his business in retaliation for his firm stance against their cause. To Otis, being a union member was synonymous with being an anarchist or socialist; all were radicals bent on destroying property rights and the American system of government. One month before the attack on the Times, an unexploded bomb was found at the Alexandra Hotel Annex in downtown LA, and on Christmas Day, a local non-union iron works plant suffered a bombing. Otis was convinced these bombs signaled a dangerous new phase in a radical campaign to destroy capitalism. He pledged to fight back hard.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation did not exist in 1910, so Otis and the Merchants and Manufacturers Association turned to the most famous private investigator in the United States, William Burns, to find the culprits. Burns believed the case was the most important of his career. If he could identify the bombers and prove the case against them in a court of law, he would not only cement his reputation as the nation’s best investigator but also make himself rich. Burns spared no expense traveling the country in search of clues. His break came when he linked a bombing in Illinois to the attacks in LA. 

The Arrest and Trial of the Suspects

Bombers often use consistent methods and materials in creating their devices. Having learned to build a bomb successfully, they repeat the process, sticking with what worked before. Burns and his agents were already investigating a bomb attack on a railroad yard in Peoria, Illinois, when the MMA hired them to investigate the LA attacks. Burns and his agents identified the materials and bomb-making methods used in the Peoria bomb closely resembled those used in the deadly bomb that destroyed the LA Times building. They traced the purchase of materials used in the bomb, and that trail led them to the brother and known associates of John McNamara, the Secretary-Treasurer of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers. One of McNamara’s hired men, a man named Ortie McManigal, was arrested and confessed to planting several bombs. 

The arrest of union members in connection with the LA bombing enraged union leaders and their supporters. Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor and “Big Bill” of the Industrial Workers of the World was convinced that Otis hired Bill Burns to plant evidence implicating union leaders. He fought back by hiring the nation’s best-known defense attorney, Clarence Darrow. Darrow quickly learned that the evidence Burns had developed proved that McManigal and the McNamara brothers were guilty. A plea bargain agreement was reached, and all three men switched their pleas to guilty and received lengthy prison sentences, shocking Gompers, Haywood, and union members across the country.

Teaching the Complexities of the Labor Struggle

The LA Times bombing is not emphasized in many history classrooms today. Teachers are more likely to teach the Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Homestead Strike of 1892. Why? A domestic terror attack by a labor union is just as disturbing as the Pinkertons’ assault on steel workers in Homestead, PA. One possible answer invokes the old adage, history is written by the winners. The Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 banned yellow-dog contracts in which workers promised not to join a union and restricted the use of injunctions blocking strikes, picketing, and boycotts. The law boosted the strength of unions and helped lead to high union membership in the 50s and 60s. In the 1960s, most Americans would not have associated union membership with incidents of domestic terrorism. 

Another possibility is historical awareness of the imbalance of power between unions and industrialists of the late 19th and early 20th century. Industrial owners held the stronger hand. When they were unable to impose their will on workers, they turned to courts and state officials to block activities that they believed threatened violence. Employers had a powerful argument. Domestic peace and prosperity depend on a stable workforce. And violence threatened entire communities. Perhaps American history students should learn about the LA Times bombing so they understand the complexities of the labor struggle in this era.

Ray Tyler was the 2014 James Madison Fellow for South Carolina and a 2016 graduate of Ashland University’s Masters Program in American History and Government. Ray is a former Teacher Program Manager for TAH and a frequent contributor to our blog.

Teaching American History has recently published World War I and the 1920s: Core Documents, a collection curated by Professor Jennifer D. Keene, Professor of History and Dean of the Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Chapman University. Keene, a specialist in American military experience during World War I, has published three studies of this subject, along with numerous essays, journal articles, and encyclopedia entries. Keene also edited our collection of core documents on World War II (2018; 2^nd ed. 2022) and teaches courses on the World Wars and Modern America for the Master of Arts in American History and Government program at Ashland University.

• 1. For Europeans, World War I was devastating. Technological advances in weaponry made combat terrible and costly to life and well-being. Many grew pessimistic about modern “progress.” To Americans, the war brought risk, loss and sacrifice, but did not diminish expectations for economic growth and social and political reforms. What accounts for the difference between the European and American experience?

Although it’s true that Americans were less devastated by the experience of World War I, the war brought profound changes to American life. We entered the war late and suffered fewer battlefield deaths than the Europeans over the course of our year and a half involvement. However, Americans of that era saw the war as the major historical event of their lifetimes, one that changed everything. It changed the role of the United States in global politics and gave it a stronger position in the global economy. It accelerated the fight for women’s suffrage. It changed African Americans’ understanding of their own prospects in our society, laying the groundwork for the modern Civil Rights movement. We also make a big mistake if we ignore the long-term effect of Wilsonian rhetoric on the way Americans understand their civic responsibilities and role in the world.

The momentum of the Progressive movement propelled America into the war and shaped Americans’ expectations. When the European war began in 1914, Woodrow Wilson based his argument for neutrality (Document 1) on the claim that neutrality would allow the United States to arbitrate between the warring sides. In April, 1917, after concluding that Germany represented a national security risk and could be defeated only if America joined the fight, Wilson delivered a war address (Document 6) that distinguished America’s war aims from those the other combatants. While others waged a territorial contest, Americans would fight to remake the international order in the image of liberal democracy. This would help the world powers negotiate their differences, preventing future wars. Fast forward to Wilson’s Fourteen Points (Document 14), and you see him approaching a negotiated settlement in a progressive manner. He first convened a group of academic experts on the contested regions of the world, “The Inquiry,” to draft his proposals. He thought he could sit down with these experts to redraw the map of Europe, rationally solving old historic conflicts that nobody else had been able to solve.

Others acted from the same progressive impulse. As Director of the US Food Administration, Herbert Hoover could have confiscated food sources and rationed them. Instead, he asked for voluntary efforts from across American society (Document 13), as he had when he headed the Commission for Relief in Belgium. To support the war effort, he asked people to voluntarily conserve food. This progressive approach left a legacy, influencing the conduct of agency heads during the mobilization for World War II.

Of course, Wilson’s reformist impulses were inconsistent. After arguing that America needed to make the world safe for democracy, he asked Congress to pass an Espionage Act that criminalized public dissent and obstruction of conscription under the new Selective Service Act. For the most part, Americans went along with this. Immediately after the war, the Supreme Court affirmed the suppression of dissent in Schenck v. United States (Document 19), ruling that freedom of speech is not an unconditional right.

• 2. Given Wilson’s intolerance of dissent, why did he change his position on women’s suffrage?

The suffrage activists forced Wilson’s hand. By 1917, the suffrage movement had divided into two main groups, each pursuing different strategies, yet it took both groups to force the change. Carrie Chapman Catt of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA; see Document 12) pressed for a federal woman suffrage amendment while seeking simultaneously to secure women’s suffrage one state at a time, by persuading states to change their own constitutions . She wanted Wilson to endorse the national movement, and use his position as head of the Democratic Party to move a proposed amendment through Congress. Catt realized she could exert pressure on Wilson by encouraging women to support the war through public volunteer efforts. “How can you ask women to assume the responsibilities of citizenship,” she asked in effect, “without according them the rights of citizens?” Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party (NWP; see Document 10) pushed more aggressively for an amendment to the federal constitution. They began picketing the White House in January 1917. No one had ever done that before. They continued after America entered the war in April, calling Wilson a hypocrite for pushing a war to safeguard democracy abroad while denying women democratic rights at home. As upper and upper middle-class women, they could use their social connections to publicize their brutal treatment in prison when they were arrested for blocking the sidewalk in front of the White House.

This negative publicity put Wilson in an embarrassing position. Meanwhile, Chapman’s state-by-state strategy made a significant gain when the state of New York voted for women’s suffrage in November 1917. Women’s exercise of voting rights in key states like New York might derail Wilson’s legislative agenda or Democrats’ chances in upcoming elections. Wilson had only squeaked by in the 1916 presidential election. Still, when Wilson endorsed giving women the vote on September 30, 1918, those in the movement remained dissatisfied; they wanted him to push the amendment through Congress. In the end, the 19^th amendment was approved by Congress after the war ended and ratified by a sufficient number of states when a single Tennessee state legislator changed his mind.

African Americans also protested the hypocrisy of a war for democracy abroad while democratic rights and protections were denied to Blacks at home (see document 20, “Returning Soldiers” by W. E. B. Dubois), but they didn’t have the same success. Wilson did nothing to combat the epidemic of racial violence that erupted in 1919 after the soldiers returned home.

• 3. During the war, government leaders used the media to rally public support. One sees this in Hoover’s use of propaganda to save food and in the posters encouraging enlistment and purchase of war bonds. Even private groups hoped to shape behavior through advertising. African Americans published advice to Southern Blacks on how to behave after migrating North (Document 22). The Sears Roebuck catalogue advertised modular home kits (Document 34). Was this a new feature of American life?

Wartime leaders always aim for unity on the home front, but Wilson faced a particular challenge. He couldn’t point to a direct attack on the US such as that at Pearl Harbor. His war address began with circumstantial evidence of the security threat, but this fell flat in the rural South, West and Midwest where populist feelings remained strong. Many said, “This is a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight”—that America entered the war to ensure that loans to the allied nations would be repaid and that American manufacturers would make nice war profits.

To solve this problem, Wilson created the first federally controlled propaganda organization, the Committee on Public Information, that used Progressive propaganda techniques, previously employed to popularize social reforms, for government purposes.

The Wilson Administration also used legal and social pressure. While the Espionage and Sedition Acts threatened arrest for those who voiced opposition, community mobilization offered incentives to support the war effort. Women signed the food pledge because a local committee woman knocked on their door; people were asked at work to buy Liberty Bonds; and then they were issued cards testifying they had done these things to hang in their windows. Displaying these cards won you social approval. Not displaying them aroused suspicion—especially if you had a German surname. Once men were conscripted, many families had a personal stake in the success of the war effort and wanted their community to support the war.

• 4. So, Wilson’s effort to mobilize the country for war succeeded.

Remarkably well, I would say. The US entered the war with just 300,000 men in the military but grew that number to over 4 million, with 1.2 million men in overseas combat, in a year and a half. We also produced the food needed for those troops. That’s an amazing success.

Did the war, as Wilson promised, spread democracy? No, but as often in US history, the aspirations of the period continued to animate activism and policy after the war. Of course, Americans wondered in hindsight whether entering the war was a mistake, especially when war clouds gathered once again in Europe. They then looked to the steps that led to entering WWI in an effort to learn from the past.  Just as it took two and a half years for us to get involved in World War I, it took two and a half years for us to enter World War II – reflecting Americans’ mixed feelings about intervening in European conflicts. Even today, Americans debate whether and how to use our power overseas so as to balance our self-interest with our idealistic goals for the world at large.

A Lesson from the Founders for Constitution Day

Americans in our day think “transparency” in government essential to its efficient and wholesome operation. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention did not entirely agree. They understood that secrecy encourages careful deliberation and compromise in the political arena.

Most of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention understood how precariously their new nation stood together, and how important it was to deliberate and compromise during that fateful summer. Thankfully, the delegates established ground rules for communicating with each other that helped to ensure the success of their meeting. We could learn an important lesson from the founders when thinking about our Congress today.

Secrecy Rules at the Convention

One of the Convention’s first decisions was to adopt secrecy rules. The delegates agreed “that no copy be taken of any entry on the journal…and that nothing spoken in the [Convention] be printed, or otherwise published, or communicated without leave.”

As John Kaminski has written, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention thought this was appropriate because it would promote deliberation and careful consideration of issues. As James Madison explained to Thomas Jefferson, the Convention thought secrecy would be “expedient in order to secure unbiased discussion within doors, and to prevent misconceptions and misconstructions without.” He wrote to James Monroe that the rule would “effectually secure the requisite freedom of discussion” and “save both the Convention and the Community from a thousand erroneous and perhaps mischievous reports.”

These remarks suggest that the delegates saw several critical benefits from a rule of secrecy during legislative debate. First, such a rule enables members to speak freely to each other while on the floor of the chamber. If members fear that their statements will be made public in order to turn public opinion against them, they will no longer discuss their ideas openly or seek to persuade each other. This would turn the whole meeting into a debating club, not a deliberative assembly.

Second, a public record can be manipulated by “mischievous” people to produce “misconceptions and misconstructions” in the public mind. The public may not read the journals and the debates, but they will read reports about them from people who can selectively quote those materials to distort what’s actually happening. To put it in today’s vernacular, reporters can take remarks “out of context” to turn the public against individual members and their proposals.

Later in his life, when reflecting on the secrecy rule, Madison described a third benefit. As he recollected, while the Convention was in debate, “the minds of the members were changing,” and if members had “committed themselves publicly at first, they would have afterwards supposed consistency required them to maintain their ground.” Keeping the deliberations secret, Madison maintained, ensured every member was “open to the force of argument” and able to change their minds freely. A secrecy rule allows representatives to listen to the arguments of others without being accused of “flip-flopping.”  

We do not know whether the Convention would have been successful without a secrecy rule, but it is clear that the delegates thought the rule essential. Madison believed that “no Constitution would ever have been adopted by the convention if the debates had been public.”

The Moderate Approach of the Early Congress

The U.S. Congress took a moderate approach to secrecy in its early years, balancing the benefits of transparency and secrecy. While the Constitution mandates that “Each House shall keep a journal of its proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such parts as may in their judgment require secrecy,” these journals merely record actions taken rather than the entirety of floor debates. Since 1794, both the House and the Senate have been open to visitors who wish to watch debates from the galleries, and debates have been published in various outlets such as the Congressional Record (since 1873). However, much of the discussions in committee rooms, cloakrooms, and elsewhere were still private, preserving the benefits of secrecy.

Transparency “Reforms” in the 1970s

Reforms in the middle of the 1970s abandoned this balanced approach. The 1970s brought in a wave of new members who, in the words of one member, “destroyed the institution by turning the lights on.” In 1973 the House prohibited closed committee hearings (the Senate did so in 1975). In closed session, committees can hear expert testimony from and ask questions of expert witnesses, and consider their recommendations. When the doors are thrown open, members feel pressured to perform for the audience, seeking to embarrass the witnesses and other members of the committee.

Reformers also took advantage of a provision of the 1970 Legislative Reorganization Act that allowed for public roll call voting. Prior to 1970, most of the votes cast in the House of Representatives were unrecorded, and thus essentially secret. Once these votes became public, members began to force “messaging” votes that were intended not to make law, but to put their political opponents “on record” for the next election. This practice has increased animosity, polarization, and vitriol in Congress.

The introduction of C-SPAN completed the transparency reforms of the 1970s. The network first began broadcasting House proceedings in 1979, and the Senate in 1986. It also covers most committee hearings. As Yuval Levin has recently written, the introduction of cameras has “turned all of Congress’ deliberative spaces into performative spaces, leaving less and less time for members to speak and work in private. The most obvious consequence of this transformation has been the explosion of grandstanding in both chambers.” Today’s committee hearings and floor debates in Congress are opportunities for members to score political points, or go viral on social media, but not to deliberate, persuade, or compromise with each other.

Recovering the Lesson from the Founders

Members are aware of the problems these transparency reforms have produced. One of them, a first-term member from North Carolina, has recently spoken out. In his experience, he writes, “The same people who act like maniacs during the open [committee] meetings are suddenly calm and rational during the closed ones. Why? Because there aren’t any cameras in the closed meetings.”

Thankfully, there are still places where members can work together on lower-profile issues, where there isn’t enough controversy to attract media. (Some playfully refer to these places as “Secret Congress.”) These places provide useful illustrations of the fact that, when they are given a little bit of space and secrecy to work together, people of different political views can still find common ground in this country on many issues.   Many Americans are frustrated with Congress’s inability to compromise or agree on anything. But they typically overlook the role that these transparency reforms have played in producing this outcome. The members of the Constitutional Convention would not have been surprised, and they would counsel us to let our elected officials talk more to each other and perform less for us.

Joseph Postell is Associate Professor of Politics at Hillsdale College and a faculty member in the Master of Arts in American History and Government (MAHG) program at Ashland University. In MAHG, Postell often teaches courses on Political Parties and on the US Congress. During the 2024 summer residential program, he delivered the Sunday evening lecture, “After Party: The Roots of Congress’s Dysfunction.” He also edited TAH’s core document collection, Congress (2020). Postell studies American political institutions and their relationship to the modern administrative state. He is the author of Bureaucracy in America: The Administrative State’s Challenge to Constitutional Government (University of Missouri Press, 2017) and coeditor of, among other volumes, American Citizenship and Constitutionalism in Principle and Practice (with Steven F. Pittz). Professor Postell is an alumnus of Ashland University, where he was an Ashbrook Scholar.

Katherine Thrailkill considered careers in drama, law, and hi-tech sales before realizing all her interests and experiences pointed her toward teaching social studies. She would help students gain political efficacy—the knowledge and confidence they need to make their voices count in our political system. Once she found her calling, colleagues helped her make her way. A key mentor was Nancie Lindblom, who showed Thrailkill how to model civil discussion. Lindblom is the 2013 Arizona Teacher of the Year and a 2014 Graduate of the MAHG program.

Thrailkill was a third-year teacher happily settled at Skyline High School in Mesa, AZ, when Lindblom phoned to ask her to apply for an opening at nearby Mountain View High. The request surprised and flattered Thrailkill. Not only was Mountain View the high school from which she’d graduated; Lindblom was a teacher she admired. While earning her Masters in secondary school education at Arizona State University, she’d observed Lindblom’s class. “That’s the teacher I want to be,” she’d thought. 

Lindblom’s “Defining America” Course

Thrailkill watched Lindblom teach a sophomore course she herself designed: “Defining America: The Fulfillment of the Promise of the Declaration of Independence.” Lindblom based it on a summer seminar she attended in the early 2000s: the Presidential Academy, a forerunner of Teaching American History’s current programs. The three-week program took teachers from across the country on a study tour of Philadelphia, Gettysburg, and Washington, DC, discussing with leading scholars three eras in history—the Founding, the Civil War, and the mid-twentieth century Civil Rights movement—all of which tested Americans’ commitment to their principles of liberty and equality. This inspired Lindblom to design an elective sophomore course on the same three periods, using many of the primary documents she’d studied in the TAH seminar. The course would prepare students for her fast-paced junior-level AP American History class. It would give them time to think about American principles while learning to read primary documents.

As Lindblom posed questions that pushed students to think through the readings, Thrailkill was reminded of her favorite undergraduate courses. A political science and philosophy double major at Arizona State University, Thrailkill learned about the American political system in large lecture halls. But small seminars on ethics and political philosophy stimulated her imagination and taught her to think critically. Lindblom’s teaching approach “was everything I wanted to do.”

How Lindblom Modeled Civil Discussion

She took the job at Mountain View. The next year she taught across the hall from Lindblom. Thrailkill watched Lindblom model civil discussion, disarming students’ fears of disagreeing with others. Increasingly reliant on cell-phone communication, today’s students often feel “anxious” when asked to debate historical or political questions, Thrailkill said. Teachers must model civil discussion. “Before challenging another person’s argument, you have to understand it. You must listen to what they say, then tell them what you heard, to verify that you understood.” This not only shows respect for the other person; it pushes you to carefully think through your own position. She found students learned this process best in small groups; afterwards, they more comfortably discussed issues with the whole class.

Lindblom, a 2011 James Madison Memorial Foundation Fellow, recommended that Thrailkill apply for the same grant, to fund a Masters emphasizing constitutional studies. She also recommended the Master of Arts in American History and Government (MAHG) at Ashland University as the ideal MA program for a working teacher interested in encouraging civil discussion of the perennial issues in American civic life. Thrailkill applied twice, and when she learned in May that she’d been awarded the grant for 2024, she felt Lindblom’s recommendation had made the difference. Looking through the Masters study options the Madison Foundation recommended, Thrailkill quickly concluded that Lindblom’s choice was the best.

Thrailkill’s First Impressions of MAHG

She registered for two courses in this year’s summer residential MAHG program. A study of Cherokee Indian removal during the 1830s would inform her on a part of history she knew little about. A second-week course on the American Founding would help her review what she’d learned as an undergraduate about the framing of the Constitution.

Teachers in the course on Cherokee history participated in a “Reacting to the Past” game, testing whether the discovery of gold on Cherokee lands make their forced displacement into the Arkansas territory inevitable. Each player acted the part of an actual historical figure or a composite of several, basing their actions on primary documents they’d read and discussed. Some played Cherokee nationalists, vowing to hold the land guaranteed them by federal treaties; some, white political leaders determined to force them off their land. Others played Cherokee leaders who thought the tribe’s survival depended on accepting removal. A fourth group represented Cherokee who were undecided. 
Most players made one or more speeches in character. Professor Jace Weaver assigned roles only after asking the teachers how comfortable they were with public speaking. Having begun college as a drama major, Thrailkill told Weaver, “I’m fine with any role you give me.” She got the role of Andrew Jackson, the historical character she most loves to hate. Presiding over a fictional meeting between representatives of the Cherokee and the white officials advocating their removal, she delivered a gracious speech of welcome that conceded none of the Cherokee claims.

The game illuminated the primary documents Thrailkill read to prepare for it. It helped her understand why Cherokee removal occurred, despite its evident injustice and the Supreme Court ruling in Worchester v. Georgia. Thrailkill now plans to use more role-playing exercises in her teaching. They make classroom debate “less risky. No one will judge you for taking Andrew Jackson’s side against the rights of Native Americans. You’re acting! Yet the exercise requires you to think about Jackson’s perspective.”

The course on the founding, taught by Professors David Alvis and Beth L’Arrivee, revealed the tense conversations that led to our constitutional framework. Delegates compromised without necessarily resolving their underlying differences. Thrailkill confided she’d “been feeling a little low lately about political efficacy.” Citizens seemed doubtful that they could make their voices heard in our polarized political climate. Given all that the founders achieved in the summer of 1787, Thrailkill “expected to come out of this course feeling a little more cynical” about current politics. “But now, I see that today’s debates reflect older ones.” The Antifederalists foresaw the elastic potential of the commerce and the “necessary and proper” clauses; our current debates over taxation and federal regulation reflect their worries. Yet the founders thought through their reasons for incorporating these and other more controversial provisions into the Constitution.

Building Students’ Political Efficacy

“I absolutely love MAHG,” Thrailkill said, impressed with the quality of the seminar conversations. The program will equip her for her life’s work of building students’ political efficacy. With the help of veteran teachers like Lindblom, Thrailkill is well positioned for the task. She advises Mountain View’s Model UN team; students on the team take her AP Comparative Government class. They study the governing systems in six nations: Mexico, whose system is modeled on that of the US; the United Kingdom, with a parliamentary system, and Nigeria, which is considering returning to such a system; the authoritarian systems in Russia and China; and the theocratic system in Iran. The team debates other teams in district, state, and sometimes national conventions. Thrailkill is constantly building the knowledge she needs for the course. She shared a shuttle ride from the airport to the Ashland campus with Henry Adeoye, a Houston-based, Nigerian-American teacher and Madison Fellow. Born to the Yoruba tribe, Adeoye engaged the Nigerian driver—an Igbo—in conversation about the differences between the Nigerian and American political systems. Thrailkill planned to tell her students about their conversation.  

During the 2022-2023 school year, Lindblom designed a new sophomore course — “Changemakers” — to teach civil discussion and build students’ political efficacy. Then she was offered the position of social studies curriculum advisor for the large Mesa Public School district. Lindblom asked Thrailkill to take on the class. Working with a veteran English Language Arts specialist (who also has become a mentor), Thrailkill implemented the double-unit course last year. It challenges students to think about how political and social reforms occur; teaches critical reading and media literacy skills; informs them on Constitutional protections for free speech; and teaches civil discussion through “structured academic controversies”—debates that require participants to restate their opponents’ arguments, conceding the strongest points, before responding. Students also select problems to research, investigating policy solutions and presenting their findings in a forum at year’s end.  “Nancie attended the forum and said we did well. A few days later I learned about the Madison fellowship,” Thrailkill said. “I’ve been blessed with brilliant and generous mentors. I feel like I won the teacher lottery!”

Two well-known black and white photographs depict the struggle to end racial segregation in Southern schools that continued after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Less well known is the woman who organized and supported the brave actions of the Little Rock Nine: Daisy Bates.

The two black and white photographs are iconic images in modern U.S. history. The first photo shows a young black woman walking with school books cradled in her left arm. Sunglasses shield her eyes but can’t hide an expression that is grim, calm, determined. Behind her, a crowd of angry whites presses forward. At the forefront is a woman whose face contorts with hate as she hurls slurs at Elizabeth Eckford, who is trying to enter Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, on September 4, 1957. It was supposed to be the first day of school for her, and for eight other black students, all of whom had been promised admission to the school.

The second photograph was taken three weeks later. The Little Rock Nine, as they came to be known, ascend the main staircase of Central High. They are guarded by helmeted troops from the U.S. Army’s 101^st Airborne Division. Many of the soldiers carry rifles fixed with bayonets. The armed escort finally made possible the students’ attendance, literally opening the doors for them.

Together, the photographs tell us much about an important historical moment. More than three years after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in the Brown v. Board of Education case that racial segregation in education and “separate but equal” were unconstitutional, Elizabeth Eckford and her peers enrolled in the all-white Central High School. Fierce opposition to integration brought not just mobs of whites to the school grounds, but also state troops, who, under orders from Arkansas governor Orville Faubus, blocked the entry of the young African Americans. This flagrant defiance of constitutional order perturbed President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who dispatched troops to Little Rock to ensure compliance with the court’s decision. The images appear to neatly capture the dynamics and drama of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Children determined to receive a good education meet with anger and the menace of violence. Yet efforts to preserve white supremacy and segregation are no match for the law of the land, enforced by federal troops.

But the pictures don’t tell the whole story. Who were these brave young men and women? Who supported and inspired them? What happened to them after they started attending school? To answer these questions, we must look beyond the photographs and focus on a singular figure in the story of the Little Rock Nine, an African American woman named Daisy Bates. Her vision, leadership, and bravery made possible the integration of Central High School in 1957. Not only is Bates important to the history of Central High’s integration, she is also a significant figure in the national Civil Rights Movement. In recognition of her historical contributions, Arkansas selected Bates to be memorialized in a statue recently unveiled at the U.S. Capitol.

Bates was born in November 1914 in a small town in southern Arkansas. White men murdered her mother when she was an infant and adoptive parents raised her. Learning what had happened to her birth mother engendered lifelong anger “about what has happened to my people,” as Bates shared in an interview. Yet on his deathbed her adoptive father counseled, “Hate can destroy you, Daisy. Don’t hate white people just because they’re white. If you hate, make it count for something.”

She made it count. After marrying, she moved with her husband L.C. Bates to Little Rock, where they put their life savings into starting a newspaper, the Arkansas State Press. Coverage of racially biased justice made them frequent targets of spurious arrests. In one instance, the Bateses were charged with contempt of court for an article they published. Daisy Bates also headed the state’s conference of NAACP branches, bringing further harassment. Undeterred, she emerged as a leader in the fight to integrate Little Rock’s schools after the Brown decision. When the white superintendent announced he would only admit one student (whose complexion was so light she could pass as white), Bates helped organize the Little Rock Nine. The students and their parents quickly came to rely on Bates, who had no children of her own, as a protector, spokeswoman, and problem-solver. Governor Faubus’s mobilization of state troops to block the students’ entry was just the first of many crises for her and the Little Rock Nine. The city’s White Citizens Council, formed to oppose integration, distributed handbills portraying her as a criminal because of the prior unjust detentions. The city council ordered her arrest for failing to provide detailed information about the NAACP branch’s membership and finances. She and her husband had to hire armed guards to protect their home. After President Eisenhower sent in the 101^st Airborne, Bates had to personally travel to the Little Rock Nine’s homes in the middle of the night to let the families know they could come to school.

Yet entry into Central High was far from the end of the integration struggle. The students faced unrelenting verbal abuse, and, in some cases, physical violence. School officials were eager to use any pretext to discipline the black students, which placed an extraordinary burden on them—even a modicum of self-defense or instinctive retaliation would be grounds for expulsion. Bates knew that if the students could not finish the academic year, not only would their bid to get an equal education be quashed, but also the national campaign to make the Brown decision a reality. As she wrote in her memoir, “Each day after school I sat with the embattled nine in the quiet basement of my home . . . these meetings were not unlike group therapy. In relating the day’s experiences, all the suppressed emotions within these children came tumbling out.” On one especially dangerous day, two of the Little Rock Nine, Minnijean Brown and Melba Pattillo, feared for their lives. Could they seek help from school officials? They didn’t dare try. “Let’s call Mrs. Bates,” Melba remembered saying. “Maybe she can talk to the army or reporters or the President.” Although Bates didn’t have a direct line to the president, the girl’s faith wasn’t misplaced. Every day, Bates was there for the Little Rock Nine. As the harassment intensified, she went to the school and demanded that stronger measures be taken against white offenders. When the school year ended in May 1955, eight of the nine had successfully completed their grade.

In his recent history of the modern Civil Rights Movement, historian Thomas E. Ricks astutely observes that, like an effective military force, the Movement depended on self-discipline, “of putting one foot in front of the other, day after day, of keeping control of one’s own emotions and fears in order to serve a greater good.” Of course, strong leaders nurture self-discipline among their “troops” by modeling restraint as well as courage. For the Little Rock Nine, and the nation, Daisy Bates set that example. As the Chicago Defender reported, “If there had been no Daisy Bates there would have been no 101^st Airborne Division patrolling the halls at Central H.S. And no nine negro children in the once all-white high school.”

Professor David Krugler (University of Wisconsin, Platteville) is the author of 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back (Cambridge University Press, 2015) as well as of two books on US policy during the Cold War. He edited TAH’s core document collection, The Cold War (2018), and has also written two World War II spy thrillers, The Dead Don’t Bleed (2016) and Rip the Angels from Heaven (2018), both published by Pegasus Crime.

Bibliography

Bates, Daisy. The Long Shadow of Little Rock. New York: D. McKay, 1962; reprint, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1986.

Interview with Daisy Bates. Southern Oral History Program Collection, October 11, 1976. Interview G-0009. https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/G-0009/menu.html

Beals, Melba Pattillo. Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High. New York: Pocket Books, 1994.

Kluger, Richard. Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1976.

Poston, Ted. “A Woman Who Dared . . . Mrs. Daisy Bates.” Chicago Defender, December 4, 1957.

Discussion of primary documents. A supportive and engaged group of educators. Historic locations. Free professional development. What more could you ask for?

Applications open soon for our Spring 2025 Multi Day Seminars! We are hosting seminars on a variety of topics in American history and politics. The application will be open September 9-29, 2024. Some of our topics include:

• Security, Self Determination, and Empire: The Grand Alliance, 1941-1945 at The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, LA.
• Controversy, Consensus, and Compromise in the American Founding, at  Pima Air & Space Museum in Tuscon, AZ.
• The End of the Cold War and the Challenge of the Nineties at  George H.W. Bush Presidential Library & Museum in College Station, TX.
• Born Into Conflict: The United States and American Indians at Castillo de San Marcos National Monument in St. Augustine, FL.
• How Congress Began at  National Constitution Center & Independence Hall National Historic Park  in Philadelphia, PA.
• Salem Witch Trials at Salem Witch Museum in Salem, MA.
• Andrew Jackson at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage in Nashville, TN.
• Ellis Island: 19^th & Early 20^th Century Immigration at Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration in Newark, NJ.

Each Multi-Day seminar runs for three days and brings together a small group of teachers from around the country. During the seminar, the teachers discuss primary documents on the seminar topic with the guidance of a scholar, who acts as the seminar leader. The seminar also includes a visit to a local historical site. See a sample itinerary here.

Teaching American History hosts Multi-Day seminars at no cost to American history and government teachers. Meals, materials, double-occupancy rooms, and historical site visits are covered 100%. At the end of each course, teacher participants receive a letter of participation for 15 contact hours and a $600 stipend to help defray travel costs or other expenses. 

For more information about our Multi-Day seminars and to see the schedule of events please click here. Have more questions? Click here.

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This summer marks the sixtieth anniversary of a watershed season of civil rights organizing across the state of Mississippi. Referenced internally as the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project and advertised as the Mississippi Freedom Project, this period has since been memorialized as Freedom Summer.  The effort sought to democratize the state that Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP, called “the most savage uncivilized state in the entire fifty states.” A turning point in civil rights strategy, Freedom Summer operated at a greater scale of magnitude and complexity than previous efforts. In a summer of activism bookended by tragedy at its beginning and a political showdown 1000 miles away from Mississippi at its close, Freedom Summer cemented the fight for civil rights and the power of student movements in stoking institutional change.

While the work of civil rights activism was urgent throughout the Jim Crow South, Freedom Summer organizers recognized the Mississippi of 1964 as a distinctly heated place and time. Mississippi was the site of the most notorious lynching in the early civil rights movement, the killing of Emmett Till in 1955, and had the highest rates of lynching in the country — violence meant to impose social, economic, and political intimidation. Add to this violence the pervasive harassment of black residents, along with numerous formal acts of repression, and it is clear why activists deemed Mississippi a crucial, yet perilous, site for resistance. As organizer Curtis Hayes put it, “If we were going to fight for freedom, Mississippi was the test. You had to break Mississippi.”

The potential and peril of activism in Mississippi had been evident in the years leading up to 1964. Young Mississippians, organized and recruited by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), participated in the Sit-in Movement. Concurrently, civil rights activists in Mississippi participated in a series of “Wade-Ins” to integrate public beaches, “Read-Ins” to desegregate public libraries, and “Pray-Ins” at all-white churches.  This ascendant energy, largely driven by students at historically black colleges like Tougaloo in Jackson, increased regional coverage of the movement and boosted momentum. And yet for many activists, the attention and momentum had not yet built to a level they felt suited the scale and urgency of the Mississippi challenge.

Then came the assassination of Medgar Evers, Field Secretary of the Mississippi NAACP, in June 1963 — the most high-profile murder of a civil rights activist to that date. This act, combined with murders of organizers who sought to register black Mississipians to vote, fortified activists’ resolve to democratize the state during the following summer.

Mississippi organizers knew that a project worthy of their ambitions would require a novel approach and greater scale of organizing than they had yet employed.  In 1961, the Mississippi chapters of the NAACP, SNCC, and CORE (in conjunction with other local groups) had begun coordinating voter outreach and registration efforts through an umbrella coalition, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). This alliance would be crucial to coordinating the 1964 Summer Project, resourcing institutional memory and best practices while also tapping into an established and committed grassroots network that operated out of churches, storefronts, community centers, and private homes throughout Mississippi’s black communities.

COFO organized intricate transportation and communication networks and recruited dedicated activists.  Organizations beyond Mississippi, such as the Northern Student Movement, responded, leading the national recruitment of college students for the Summer Project. They also collaborated with the National Council of Churches (NCC) to coordinate training for these volunteers. The young volunteers were joined in Mississippi by over 250 NCC-sponsored clergy, along with hundreds of legal and healthcare professionals. Myriad organizations were aligned, focused, and mobilized to support COFO’s goals.

The most controversial strategy of the Summer Project was COFO’s decision to invite white students to participate. Critics both worried about the blowback from endangering white students and feared the repercussions of potentially reckless and ignorant white volunteers visiting Mississippi on what might amount to a glorified “service project” for them. Ultimately, the perspective of Bob Moses — a Harvard-educated math teacher and organizer from Harlem (and the man most identified with Freedom Summer’s field operation) won out. As Moses maintained, “These students bring the rest of the country with them. They’re from good schools and their parents are influential. The interest of the country is awakened and … the government responds.” Moses knew that activist efforts and the subsequent assaults that followed often struggled for recognition beyond the black press, and would gain a greater spotlight through interracial allyship. However, both critics and supporters of the invitation insisted that the Summer Project weed out applicants with any hint of ulterior or cynical agendas, and that field secretaries communicate to white volunteers, in no uncertain terms, the stakes of the Summer Project’s work.

Close experience of Mississippi’s struggles made the stakes of the Summer Project tragically, vividly, and starkly clear. Just one day after the first wave of white volunteers arrived to assist in voter mobilization, three volunteers already working on the ground — black Mississippian James Chaney and white New Yorkers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — went missing. COFO immediately contacted federal law enforcement and the national media to demand and publicize a manhunt. Movement pressure forced the FBI to open an office in Jackson that summer, and compelled Mississippi governor Paul B. Johnson to cooperate in the search as well. In the course of the investigation, and before discovering the bodies of the three civil rights workers six weeks later, law enforcement discovered eight more murdered young black men, whose disappearances had not been investigated. (Many of these victims still have not been identified decades later.)  Now no one could deny the peril of their summer mission. But the revelations strengthened the overwhelming majority of volunteers in their sense of purpose. Intentions matured into resolve.

While the Summer Project contained numerous facets, they were all united by the motif of freedom. In the Fall of 1963, black Mississippians had begun to refer to their political participation as “Freedom Votes” and by early 1964 were drawing local media attention to “Freedom Days” of voter registration. Summer Project workers lived and worked in rented or donated spaces that became known as “Freedom Houses.” Volunteers who came to Mississippi after the initial June wave often assisted the ongoing civic and practical education taking place in “Freedom Schools.” Permeating all of this work, in all of these spaces and beyond, were the “Freedom Songs” of joy, solidarity, and determination — expressions of collective purpose that acted as their own form of resistance.

The best known of these “freedom facets” is also the most immediately politically consequential one: the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Just as other parts of the Summer Project fought to democratize the citizenry, the MFDP fought to democratize the state’s dominant political institutions. While black voters in Great Migration cities had gravitated toward the Democratic Party during the New Deal, in the South the party had long been a bastion of unreconstructed Southerners and Jim Crow enforcers, with no black representation whatsoever in Mississippi. The Freedom Democrats mirrored the procedures of the state’s official Democratic Party as closely as possible — from paperwork, to precinct meetings, to delegation selection — with the crucial modification of making each of these processes open and inclusive, the goal being to  seat a more representative delegation as the official Mississippi Democratic Party at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) that August.

Continuing to adhere scrupulously to party procedures, the MFDP arrived in Atlantic City intending to persuade the convention’s credentials committee that, as the only Mississippi delegates selected through an open and transparent process, they were the rightful representatives of the state’s best interests. They entered the convention with public sympathy on their side; the bodies of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman (murdered at the beginning of the Summer Project) were discovered two days before the convention’s start, refocusing national attention on the cause. And with the MFDP’s chosen lead petitioner to the credentials committee, Fannie Lou Hamer, they found a forceful appeal to hearts and minds. The most famous figure to rise to national attention during Freedom Summer, Hamer had been repeatedly terrorized and arrested for her activity in voter mobilization efforts.  In her speech at the DNC on August 22, she detailed abuses she and other activists had suffered before closing with a pointed challenge to the committee:

 … if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?

Hamer’s speech further swayed public sympathy for the MFDP. While President Lyndon Johnson had been making significant steps in recognizing civil rights, including signing the CIvil Rights Act earlier in the summer, he feared the electoral consequences of supporting the MFDP. At his insistence, the DNC delayed a recognition vote (to cool the emotions Hamer aroused), then offered a compromise: the DNC would recognize two MFDP delegates (one black member, one white member) in a ceremonial capacity and promise larger structural change and greater inclusion at future conventions. The compromise satisfied neither the MFDP (who rejected it and continued to protest) nor the all-white official state party (all but a handful leaving in outrage).  Johnson’s political maneuvering on this front proved for naught: while he defeated Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in a landslide in the November general election, he ultimately lost Mississippi and four other Deep South states.

Many of the most impactful feats of activism demonstrate powerful combinations of protest and partnership, resistance and coordination. Freedom Summer shows how such cooperation bears fruit. The project drew on a vast network of interpersonal and organizational partnerships, involving a cast of thousands. The creativity, discipline, and courage of the participants galvanized future efforts in the civil rights and student movements. While Freedom Summer’s voter registration efforts ultimately fell short of organizational ambitions, it inspired future mobilization efforts in Mississippi and beyond.  It fed the momentum for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Finally, its institutional challenge at the DNC precipitated changes in both the delegation practices and in the very composition of the Democratic Party.

ADDITIONAL WORKS CONSULTED

Biewen, John, host/producer. “Freedom Summer.” Scene On Radio. Season 4, Episode 7. Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University. April 2020. Podcast.

Dittmer, John.  Local People: the Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. University of Illinois Press, 1995

“Freedom Summer, 1964.” History this Week. The History Channel. June 2020. Podcast.

“I Question America: 1963-1964.” Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. Jackson, MS. Visited on-site June 2024.

SNCC & Grassroots Organizing: Interpretive Booklet. SNCC Legacy Project. 2024.

Malik Ali, a James Madison Fellow and 2017 graduate of the Master of Arts in American History and Government program, is Tukman Distinguished Teacher of History at the Branson School in Ross, California.