Primer beef.

• Author: Rotherham, Andrew J.
• Position: Book Review

WHOSE AMERICA: Culture Wars in the Public Schools by Jonathan Zimmerman Harvard University Press, $29.95

MOST PEOPLE HAVE NEVER heard of Harold Rugg, even though, for a time, he was a leading author of American textbooks and millions of Americans read his work in school. During the 1930s and 1940s, Rugg's histories inspired heated debates and denunciations because he stressed a social interpretation of history, arguing, for example, that the Founding Fathers were not detached from material interests, feared the economic consequences of "too much democracy," and questioned whether America was a "land of opportunity for all people." These and other statements were enough to incite interest groups and a host of editorial writers to action in a fight that mirrored the contemporary political disagreements about the New Deal and other Roosevelt policies. Their denunciations of and campaigns against Rugg drove him out of the textbook business altogether by the early 1940s. He's now largely forgotten.

The controversy over Rugg's work traces a pattern familiar to followers of today's school wars. Most disputes about education are not as much about children as about competing visions of American history and society. Because public schools transfer knowledge, customs, and values to future generations, fights about textbooks and curricula serve as proxies for many of society's disagreements. Almost any quarrel ostensibly about the public schools really involves an argument among adults with divergent views of the world.

Jonathan Zimmerman shines a light on these issues in Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools. While he concludes with a proposal for detente, his own account shows that these disputes are likely to be as intractable as they are longstanding. He chronicles epic struggles during the 19th and 20th centuries waged over textbook content by such organizations as the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Education Association, as well as veterans' groups and racial and ethnic associations, all of whom had differing interpretations of events and individuals in textbooks.

He also examines controversies about prayer and sex education, which have been waged since the earliest days of public schools but which became more partisan during the second half of the 20th century. Ultimately, though, these chapters are less compelling than discussions of the study of history, not because of Zimmerman's effort but because, as he...