Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880-1920.

PRICE, MICHAEL E.

Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880-1920, by James L. Leloudis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Illustrations. xvii, 338 pp. $39.95.

Historians have long debated the social and cultural processes inherent in the transformation of a market economy into a market society. Whereas some maintain that the distinction is artificially drawn because such terms are synonymous, others link the maturation of market-oriented social relations and cultural norms to the dissolution of traditional social and cultural arrangements. In this well-written and thoroughly researched monograph, James L. Leloudis illuminates the role played by educational reformers in the market transformation of North Carolina between 1880 and 1920. Unlike William Faulkner's sons of an undying past who endured tortured lives haunted by the heroic ghosts of the previous generation, the young men who initiated and led the graded school movement in North Carolina readily abandoned the ways and values of a bygone era and envisioned for public education a central role in leading their state and region into a genuinely New South. Described by Professor Leloudis as "bitter critics of their father's world," such men "neither formed lasting attachments to the Old South nor felt the need to justify the Lost Cause" (p. xiii).

Leading educational reformers in North Carolina such as Edwin Alderman, James Yadkin Joyner, and Charles Duncan McIver thought of new schoolhouses, professionalized teacher training, and bureaucratic administrative control as a bridge from the plantation to a commercial economy. According to Leloudis, educational reformers "looked to the classroom" to inculcate the rising generation with "the habits of wage labor and market production," while simultaneously promising racial stability and order "in a world of hardening segregation and black disfranchisement." The central role assigned to women in the new culture of schooling also shaped new gender ideals "that reflected the primacy of the self in a society" increasingly less committed "to traditional relations of family and community" (p. xii).

Modernizing North Carolina's educational system was anything but easy. In a largely Baptist rural culture deeply committed to localized control and the subservience of schooling to the cyclical needs of subsistence agriculture or plantation production, it is hardly surprising that the graded school reform movement first took root in North Carolina's burgeoning market towns and cities. Leloudis appropriately describes such commercial centers as being home to the "progressive man of business" in an age "increasingly attentive to the main chance" (p. 20). Eager to shatter the ideological bonds between the common schools and local patterns of social authority, educators and civic leaders saw in graded education a vehicle by which to deliver the transformative ideology of an "expansive bourgeois civilization" (p. 50).

Severing its ties with the educational traditions of the plantation elite with greater ease than other institutions of higher learning in the South, the University of North Carolina emerged as an early leader in the educational reform movement. Yet resistance to reform initiatives characterized by centralized bureaucratic control proved so enduring that opposition to the graded school movement surfaced in the 1890s during the Populist-Republican insurgency. In response, educational reformers jumped on the bandwagon when the state's Democratic leadership moved forcefully to eradicate the potential for further unrest from the countryside. As might be expected, educational reformers took heart in 1900 when gubernatorial candidate Charles Brantley Aycock "built his campaign around disfranchisement, education, and economic development" (p. 137).

Although willing to play the race card to diffuse the Fusionist threat, Aycock and his allies in the educational reform movement took the utilitarian high road to modernization. Pledging their firm commitment to the preservation of the color line, school reformers believed that the children of "untrained" whites and blacks alike should be educated to fulfill their proper role in the new social order. When business leaders, wealthy landowners, and influential Democrats proved reluctant to fund necessary improvements, advocates of the new education turned to "reform-minded middle-class women" and Northern philanthropists for support. Backed by the generous support of the Southern Education Board and the General Education Board, the Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses set out to remake the countryside in the image of the town through a systematic campaign of school beautification, scientific agriculture, and sanitation work. To quote Leloudis, "the new education owed its final triumph to a convergence of male and female reform cultures, both of which were born of a rejection of nineteenth-century partisanship and patronage politics" (p. 145).

Garnering white support in North Carolina for reform initiatives aimed at African-American schools proved more problematic. Once again, Northern philanthropists came to the aid of the school reform movement by financing initiatives such as the Jeanes program that were committed to industrial education and racial accommodation. Whereas white educational leaders saw such programs as reinforcing racial segregation, training school instructors and Jeanes teachers "read into the lessons of industrial training their own meanings and desires" (p. 199). In particular, Leloudis emphasizes a pervasive communal spirit in African-American schools that contrasted sharply with "the ethic of individualism that resounded so loudly in much of the home and farm demonstration work among white school children" (p. 201).

Given his sensitivity to the ways in which African Americans subverted white educational reform initiatives to their own communal purposes, it is troublesome that Leloudis devotes little attention to white communal resistance to the cultural dictates of the nation's expanding market society. Such resistance did not disappear with the demise of the Populists. The dedicated women of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, for example, worked diligently to maintain respect for the Lost Cause and traditional values in the public school curriculum. Southern landlords and their political allies proved remarkably adept at insulating the social arrangements and cultural assumptions of plantation society from the corrosive power of the market for decades beyond the chronological range of this study. Such interpretive quibbles aside, Schooling the New South is a fine piece of scholarship and essential reading for students of the New South.

MICHAEL E. PRICE Armstrong Atlantic State University