Adjustment: 1920–1954

World War I, according to President Woodrow Wilson and other sloganeers, made “the world safe for democracy.” Americans were largely spared the cataclysmic effects of the Great War endured by Europeans. Nonetheless, the national mood in the United States changed dramatically, and, as is so often the case, this shift in sentiments could be clearly discerned in new priorities for the school system, initially for children of welleducated and wealthy parents. Pundits proclaimed that assimilation had been achieved, although the practices associated with it faded only gradually over the next two decades and particularly persisted in schools serving immigrant and other low-income children. America in the 1920s experienced a period of growing wealth, considerable corporate and governmentally ignored greed, widespread racial and religious bigotry, and rapidly changing social mores, particularly for urbanites. In such a period, discussions about the national need for assimilation as a means of preserving the democracy seemed out of place. With so much change in the air, “adjustment” to the new times emerged as the new catchword. Many of the most salient events and practices of the post–World War I period (the Teapot Dome financial scandal, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings of blacks in the South, and the economic depression following the stock market crash of 1929) did not reflect well on the democracy Americans aspired to have. President Wilson might claim that the world was “safe for democracy,” but his piece of the world, the United States, did not admirably demonstrate it at the time. Nor, of course, did the new Soviet Russia, recently emerged both from incredible losses in World War I and from the yoke of the czars and now engaging in a different form of authoritarian rule. Germany, principal adversary of the Allies in World War I, entered the 1920s badly broken. The Germans attempted a new and ultimately unstable form of government before acquiescing to Hitler’s takeover in 1933, resulting in a devastating defeat of democracy. As the Roaring Twenties took off, American educators, always anxious to be au courant with what was expected of them, found their old priorities obsolete. Prescient school men recognized that the focus was shifting from schools serving a need defined by the nation (assimilation) to one defined by informed, ambitious, and often affluent parents seeking a more supportive school environment for their children and by newly articulate professors of education.