The authors would like to acknowledge that this article was written using research funded by two land-grant
universities, the University of Kentucky which benefits from the theft of land belonging to Osage, Shawnee, and
Cherokee Nations, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign which benefits from the theft of land belonging
to the Peoria, Kaskaskia, Piankashaw, Wea, Miami, Mascoutin, Odawa, Sauk, Potowatomi, Ojibwe, and Chickasaw
Nations. These lands were the traditional territory of these Native Nations prior to their forced removal; these lands
continue to carry the stories of these Nations and their struggles for survival and identity. These Nations remain in
relationship with these lands, and as land-grant institutions these universities have a particular responsibility to
acknowledge these relationships, their roles in this dispossession, and their duties to facilitate restoration.

1

How Progressive Were the Progressives?
A New Look at the Building America Classroom Magazines.

Jared R. Stallones, University of Northern Colorado
Lindsay Stallones Marshall, University of Oklahoma

Introduction

In 1934, Paul Hanna, a professor at
Teachers College, Columbia, proposed that
the Society for Curriculum Study (SCS)
publish a monthly magazine designed to
help teachers lead classroom discussions of
“social problems” and possible solutions.
The Society claimed the series was a
response to the "persistent and widespread
demand by educators for a new type of
classroom material that will give students a
working knowledge of social and economic
forces and institutions" (Society for
Curriculum Study 1935a, 1). Christened
Building America, the series lasted nearly
ten years, first published by SCS, then by
the National Education Association’s
Department of Supervision and Curriculum
Development. The series was widely
popular and was used in military training
and in the educational rehabilitation of Axis
nations after World War II. The series
eventually ran afoul of Red Scare mongers
and curricular conservatives in the late
1940’s. Opponents raised objections both
about the magazines’ content and the “social
problems” pedagogical approach they
encouraged. Before its demise, however,
the series tackled subjects from housing,
healthcare, and labor to gender, technology,
and foreign relations. This study will
contextualize Building America within the
history of progressive educational and
political thought and will compare the

pedagogical methods of Building America to
contemporary approaches in the social
studies. It will investigate the magazine’s
representation of Native Americans as an
example of how it dealt with issues that are
still the subject of discussion in schools and
society.

Building America as a Product of
Progressivism

Progressives advocate improvement
or reform, as opposed to maintaining the
status quo. Progressivism in education took
many forms in the United States in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but few
acted with the passion and urgency of the
social reconstructionists during the
economic and social crises of the Great
Depression. Progressive ideas and practices
in education had been in the ascendancy for
decades, spawning curriculum elements
focused on enlisting student interest in
learning, project-based learning, and
experiential teaching methods. Educators
began to pay greater attention to children’s
psychological and emotional development.
The dislocations wrought by the Great
Depression accelerated the adoption of
progressive education in the schools as the
public cast about for new solutions to
economic and social devastation. The
Depression also shifted the focus of
progressive reforms in the schools away
from the individual child to the child’s place
in society. Social reconstructionist educator



2

Henry Harap recalled that at that time,
"Many people thought that we were on the
brink of an economic disaster...It was a time
of a terrific awakening of the schools to their
educational responsibilities" (Harap 1970,
157).

This “awakening” took many
educational forms. The Progressive
Education Association (P.E.A.) suffered a
split as social reconstructionists leveled
heavy critiques at the organization. They
accused the P.E.A. of passively clinging to
its original focus on the child rather than
more aggressively addressing the social and
economic conditions in which the child grew
and learned. No criticism was more strident
than George Counts’ “Dare the Schools
Build a New Social Order?” delivered at the
1932 P.E.A. Convention. John Dewey was
not as critical as some, but clearly lined up
with the social reconstructionists in his 1934
article “Can Education Share in Social
Reconstruction?” In that piece he asserted
that schools alone could not change society,
but that they could provide the “intellectual
and moral” basis for citizens to do so (in
Boydson 1986, 207).

Other organizations joined the
conversation, as well. The American
Historical Association had been reviewing
the social studies curriculum for some time,
and its Commission on the Social Studies
published A Charter for the Social Sciences
in the Schools in 1932 and Conclusions and
Recommendations of the Commission in
1934. Both documents argued that the
purpose of social studies in the schools was
to describe “the conditioning elements,
realities, forces and ideas of the modern
world in which life must be lived” and in
which citizenship must be exercised
(American Historical Association 1932, 98).
At its 1932 Annual Meeting, the National
Education Association’s (NEA) Department
of Superintendence organized a committee
to recommend “such adjustments in the

social studies curricula in our junior and
senior high schools as our present social and
economic situation has made necessary and
vital” (Kelley 1932, 208). The NEA’s
Department of Social Studies also focused
on the need for “free and thoughtful
discussion in the schools of the complex
social and economic issues” (Newman 1960,
28).

Individuals and institutions
responded to these calls in various ways. In
1934, William Heard Kilpatrick’s “dinner-
study” group began publication of Social
Frontier, a periodical “to help teachers
explore their responsibilities in the rapidly
changing cultural milieu” (Newman 1960,
17). Meanwhile, Kilpatrick’s colleague at
Teachers College, Columbia, Herbert Bruner,
produced a series of informational
pamphlets for high schools on the national
crisis, called the “Social Legislation Series”
(Society for Curriculum Study 1933, 10).
And, of course, Harold Rugg’s Man and His
Changing Society textbook series was in its
heyday during these years. The books’
depiction of American society, which many
saw as overly critical, fit the educational
spirit of the times. Not surprisingly, these
figures formed a network of educators with
common interests and often worked on
projects together.

The Launch of Building America
Many in the network were also

members of the Society for Curriculum
Study. By 1934, the Society was one of the
most influential forces in the American
curriculum field. Its membership included
curriculum directors, teachers, university
professors, and those working with
curriculum in non-school settings. For some
years, the Society had been concerned about
schools’ roles in addressing the economic
and social impact of the Great Depression,
so its 1934 meeting in Cleveland was an
ideal venue for Paul Hanna to propose the



3

Building America project. He did so in a
meeting of the Society’s Committee for the
Collection and Construction of Curriculum
Materials Treating Modern Problems. The
committee, chaired by Herbert Bruner of
Teachers College, Columbia, was an
expression of the Society’s “intention of
constructing curriculum materials dealing
specifically with the social, economic, and
political phases of American Reconstruction
for use in our schools and colleges” (Society
for Curriculum Study 1934a, 39). Hanna
displayed an impressive collection he had
assembled of extant curriculum materials on
the topic and “distributed a very carefully
selected 27 page bibliography of current and
supplementary materials on social,
economic, and political problems” (ibid.).
He then read a paper entitled “Building
America” which he and James Mendenhall
had written and earlier presented to the
Society’s Executive Committee. The paper
decried the lack of effective classroom
resources for discussing “social problems,”
especially because the curriculum materials
failed to make good use of graphics to
accompany text. They wrote,

[with few exceptions] none of these
materials uses what is known through
research and practical experience
concerning visual presentation.
Photographs, graphs, charts, maps, etc.
give a depth of meaning to a study of
contemporary problems which can
never be attained by the printed word
alone (ibid., 40).

Hanna and Mendenhall called on the Society
to cooperatively produce a series of “picture
texts” on various topics,

Each issue would attempt to present a
comprehensive picture of the present
status and future possibilities of
American agriculture, industry,

commerce, mining, transportation,
communication, housing, social and
governmental institutions, etc. (in
Newman 1960, 38).

The authors conveniently suggested a list of
possible topics for the texts, described as
‘problems,” which resonated with
progressive views of the era. These topics
included “Our Government in Business,”
“Conservation of Natural Resources,”
“Socially Useful Work by Children,”
“Financial Control,” “Depressions (causes
and effects),” and “Planning America”
(Society for Curriculum Study 1934a, 43).
The list also suggested an issue on
“American Indians,” which will be
discussed in detail below.

At the conclusion of the meeting the
membership voted to study the proposal, but
the following week the Society’s Executive
Committee went ahead and launched the
publication. It placed Paul Hanna in charge
of the project and named an editorial board
that included Hollis Caswell, Jesse Newlon,
Harold Hand, and William S. Gray, all
notable leaders in education. The Executive
Committee was also careful to assert the
ideological neutrality of the publication,
affirming that “in controversial social and
political areas the Society does not sponsor
materials designed to further any particular
program of social reconstruction” (Society
for Curriculum Study 1934b, 2). But use of
the word “particular” belies the firm roots
the Society, and Building America, had in
political progressivism. Those roots would
ultimately contribute to the project’s demise
in the post-WWII era.

Building America’s Pedagogy
Building America received a warm

reception from the educational community.
By its second year of publication, the
Society for Curriculum Study was unable to
accommodate the number of requests for



4

subscriptions and had to contract with a
publisher better equipped to handle the large
volume of printing and distribution.
Testimonials from teachers and
administrators across the country were used
to promote the project. A high school
teacher from Philadelphia stated, "Building
America seems to me decidedly teachable
material...I hope the series goes on and on"
(Hanna 1936, 4). A junior high school
teacher in Maine wrote, "I find it of great
help in teaching Vocational Information"
(ibid). A superintendent in Minnesota
commented, "This material challenges the
imagination" (ibid, 6). One in Arkansas
claimed, "This publication is very unique
and we think it will serve to 'Build
America'" (ibid). An elementary school
principal in Michigan wrote, "This looks
like a real contribution to teaching. I hope to
see it widely used in our system" (ibid). One
in New York City predicted,

Building America promises to be an
excellent magazine for all grades from
kindergarten up. Covering so many
subjects it will assist in complete
correlation. It solves the difficulty of
securing suitable pictures and of course
is highly educational as a visual aid
(ibid, 7).

A junior high school principal thought that
the series was so "beautiful and suggestive"
that it "ought to be on the New York City
supply list for Junior High Schools" (ibid).
A curriculum director in Virginia thought,
"The material is a most valuable tool for
teaching. It deals with vital problems in an
interesting and understandable way for girls
and boys. It seems to be a splendid
contribution to education" (ibid).

One reason for the acclaim Building
America received is that it represented a
confluence of many popular trends in
pedagogy and curriculum. The magazines

reflected the growing sophistication in use
of visual materials and their combination
with clear, concise textual descriptions. The
presence on the editorial board of Edgar
Dale, a leader in the use of audio-visual
materials in classrooms, helped ensure that
high quality graphics were used, and of
William S. Gray, an authority in the field of
children’s reading, helped ensure the
integrity of the textual components. Three-
quarters of the space in each issue was
devoted to pictorial representations with the
text as a supporting feature, much more like
textbooks today than the text-dense books of
the time.

Building America was also deeply
committed to problem-solving as a
pedagogical method. Problem-based
curricula already had a long heritage in
progressive education, going back to John
Dewey’s experimentalism and William
Heard Kilpatrick’s Project method. The
teacher’s guide to the first issue included
this introduction,

Every issue of Building America is
presented to the student as a problem to
be solved. The facts and ideas
presented in each number and the
questions raised are all intended to
challenge the student's thinking and
help to him enter upon some
constructive line of thought toward a
solution to these problems (Society for
Curriculum Study 1935b, 1).

A modern analog to the problems-based
approach is inquiry-based instruction, as
expressed in the Next Generation Science
Standards and in the guiding principles of
National Council for the Social Studies’
College, Career, and Civic Life (C3)
Framework. Building America encouraged
teachers to guide students along lines of
inquiry. The guide to the “Housing” issue
suggested that teachers frame instruction in



5

the topic with challenging questions such as,
“How can young Americans help in building
good homes? What can we do in our
community to assist in bringing the
problems of housing to the attention of the
public?” (ibid). Like the C3 Framework,
Building America went beyond simply
conveying information and called learners to
action, even if it derived from social critique.
Paul Hanna called on teachers to accept “the
challenge that our culture may be improved
by the process of analyzing the culture’s
shortcomings, projecting solutions, and
taking the necessary action to translate plans
into achievement” (Hanna 1938, 144).

Interdisciplinarity is another trend of
progressive education that was reflected in
Building America. If education is a process
of problem-solving, interdisciplinary
approaches follow naturally because real life
problems do not present themselves in
discrete disciplinary packages. It made sense
to teach subjects in relation to one another,
or to eschew “subjects” altogether and teach
topically, in the manner of Building America.
In fact, the field of social studies was
founded on the view that the social sciences
and humanities were best taught in
integrated ways and generations of materials
have been formatted this way, from Hanna’s
‘expanding communities’ design to teach
about basic human activities to the highly
integrated Man: A Course of Study
curriculum. Building America was firmly in
this line. Each teacher’s guide contained a
table of magazine topics cross-referenced
with the variety of courses they could be
used in, with most topics applicable to many
courses. For instance, the teacher’s guide to
the “Housing” issue suggested that its topics
could be used in almost all areas of the
curriculum and recommended ways to use
the issue in history, sociology, economics,
geography, English, mathematics, science,
home economics, and industrial arts (Society
for Curriculum Study 1935b, 1). Perhaps

because of this interdisciplinary approach,
Building America was used in all grades, in
colleges, adult study groups, and Civilian
Conservation Corps camps.

Building America was intended to
appeal to students’ natural interests, one of
the hallmarks of progressive education. A
teacher’s guide advised,

One of the most important
principles of psychology is that people
learn by doing [emphasis theirs]. This
principle applied to education means
that the teacher should provide a wealth
of activities in which students
participate. These activities stimulate
their interest in a problem, help them to
acquire vital information, assist them in
achieving habits of cooperative work,
and finally bring them face to face with
the world outside the school (Society
for Curriculum Study 1935b, 2).

The suggestions for teaching with each issue
are replete with ideas to engage students in
interesting activities around the topic and
not passive exposure to content.
Recommended instructional activities
included conducting community surveys,
creating maps, presenting findings to
community groups, and writing editorials.
Even the rationale for producing heavily
visual materials was based in a belief that
pictorial depictions of life conditions
engaged children’s interest more effectively
than textual explanations alone. Every issue
included a “Note to the Teacher or Group
Leader,” which advised, “If a student is to
gain most from his study, he must respond
actively both to illustrations and text. In
examining a photograph, he should be
encouraged to inquire, and answer for
himself, ‘Does this portray a typical or an
unusual condition?’ In reading the text, he
should ask himself, ‘Does this check with
other facts I have read?’” (Department of



6

Supervision and Curriculum Development,
N.E.A. 1943, ix-x).

Finally, Building America also
claimed high standards of scholarship. The
Society claimed that, "The facts presented in
the Building America series are the result of
painstaking research into the most reliable
sources available. In addition, these
materials are carefully reviewed by a
representative Editorial Board and by
reputable authorities on the topics treated"
(Society for Curriculum Study 1935a, 1).
This scientific approach to curriculum
appealed to many progressive educators who
considered accurate information and expert
analysis to be foundations of good civic
education. For instance, Harold Rugg
consulted a group of “frontier thinkers,”
including Charles A. Beard, Frederick
Jackson Turner, Thorstein Veblen, and John
R. Commons, to inform his textbook series
(Rugg 1941, 200). This practice also shaped
Paul Hanna’s Scott, Foresman textbooks and
no major textbook today lacks a long list of
prestigious experts and educators on its
editorial board.

Following the inaugural issue on
housing, Building America was published
each month, October through May, from
1935 until 1948. Each issue included many
photographs and enough text to inform
students and stimulate discussion. The
project was an earnest attempt to employ the
“social problems” approach to develop
critical thinkers capable of taking informed
action. Ultimately, though, Building
America ran afoul of changing trends in
education. The World War II and postwar
eras saw a turn away from practices of
educational progressivism such as social
criticism and the problems method of
instruction. The ultra-patriotic mood of the
times caused some to look on social
criticism with suspicion. Some politicians of
the time chose to further their careers by
attacking such practices. In California in

1947 this led to a legislative investigation of
the ideological foundations of Building
America and its founders. The negative
publicity generated from this investigation
resulted in canceled subscriptions and the
magazine's ultimate demise.

Depictions of Native Culture in Textbooks
During the 1947 legislative

investigation of Building America, Hanna
defended the curriculum’s problem-centered
approach. In a lengthy public statement he
assured readers that despite the accusations
against it, “when people take the time to
carefully read the Building America
bulletins themselves rather than take a
critic’s word for it, the overwhelming
majority will agree that these study units are
strongly patriotic and American” (Hanna
1948). United States history curriculum has,
since its earliest design, been first and
foremost a vehicle for instilling a sense of
American identity in schoolchildren. From
their earliest iterations schools established,
valued, and functioned as “pillars of the
Republic,” using U.S. history courses as
opportunities to teach students the virtues
and pride of living in, as Thomas Jefferson
famously declared, an empire of liberty. It is
not insignificant that Jefferson’s first
recorded use of the phrase in a 1780 letter to
George Rogers Clark punctuated
instructions for attacking “the British and
Indian savages… preparing to invest our
western frontier.” Jefferson, like his
predecessors and his successors, saw Native
nations primarily as obstacles to American
progress. Therefore, seizure of their lands
was merely the opportunity to “add to the
Empire of liberty an extensive and fertile
Country...” (Jefferson 1780).

The contradiction inherent in
Jefferson’s phrase is the contradiction at the
heart of the country’s history. It allows a
revolution for liberty to establish a country
built through slavery, a Doctrine of



7

Discovery to authorize one people to
violently drive others from their homeland
and declare it had been unoccupied
wilderness. To teach this history in a way
that promotes the formation of a positive
sense of American identity is fundamentally
in competition with an honest examination
of the historical past. As a result, United
States history curriculum often
misrepresents the stories of groups whose
histories complicate that positive sense of
identity. Because Native history is the
context in which United States history
occurs, its narratives are in starkest
contradiction to the claims of American
triumphalism. In order for schools to
maintain the fiction of an empire of liberty,
Native history is therefore the most
dramatically misrepresented topic in U.S.
history curriculum.

As events from Tippecanoe to
Standing Rock have demonstrated, refusing
to acknowledge Native sovereignty has long
been the linchpin of establishing American
legitimacy both in law and in popular
imagination. As the power dynamics
between Native nations and the U.S. state
shifted over the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, U.S. history curriculum reflected a
narrative of events that favored increasing
erasure of Native history in favor of the
growth of the United States. As Ruth Miller
Elson noted in Guardians of Tradition,
nineteenth century textbook depictions of
Native people were firmly rooted in racist
theories of white supremacy, caught in the
tension between mythologizing the violence
and primitivity of Native people in order to
justify colonization and heralding Native
nations as exceptional both in their roles as
the “first Americans” and to depict them as
formidable obstacles in order to valorize
westward expansion (Elson 1964, 71). The
wars of westward expansion that followed
the Civil War amplified the narrative that
Native people were obstacles to American

progress. Curriculum coalesced around the
unifying theme that there would be “no
dissent from the doctrine of the manifest
destiny of the Americans to take land from
the Indians,” with textbooks offering the
development of the U.S. West as proof it
was a positive good (ibid., 76-7).

In the twentieth century textbook
narratives hardened around the westward
expansion narrative, following in Frederick
Jackson Turner’s footsteps to recast all U.S.
history as a frontier experience. With open
warfare waged by the U.S. Army against
Native nations over, textbooks continued to
center narratives of westward expansion as a
form of nationalistic redemptive violence, if
sometimes regrettable in its means. For the
next hundred years, in textbook narratives
Native people either became inspiration for
the melting pot ideals of American society
through Dawes-Act-fueled assimilation, or
authors wrote their part as the “vanishing
Indian,” figures like Sitting Bull frozen in
time in the glory days of the Old West,
rarely mentioned at all after 1890. As
Patricia Limerick writes, “with very few
exceptions, the textbook treatment of the
West follows a deeply-worn set of ruts”
(Limerick 1992, 1382).

Although the Civil Rights Movement
inspired some curricular change of Native
depiction in textbooks that change was
superficial, and in many cases that change
reinforced stereotypes rather than
challenging them. In their 1970 survey of
over 300 textbooks, a team of scholars led
by Rupert and Jeannette Costo’s American
Indian Historical Society found “not one
could be approved as a dependable source of
knowledge about the history and culture of
the Indian people in America.” Worse, they
concluded, “most books were, in one way or
another, derogatory to the Native
Americans” (Costo 1970, 11). Over a decade
later Frederick Hoxie, historian and director
of the Newberry Library’s D’Arcy



8

McNickle Center for American Indian and
Indigenous Studies, conducted his own
survey. Finding the same inadequacies
Hoxie decried textbook authors’ failure to
incorporate even decades-old scholarship,
saying “it is easier to add a brief biography
of Geronimo to a chapter on the West than
to surrender our self-image as tamers of the
wilderness or settlers in a virgin land”
(Hoxie 1984, 2). In 1941, however, Building
America had attempted something different.

Native Culture in Building America
Part one of Building America’s series

Our Minority Groups, The American Indians
introduced students to challenges facing
modern Native nations through the lens of
Native history. Following the footsteps of
Harold Rugg’s ill-fated Problems in
American Democracy curriculum, Hanna
explained “To deny our youth a chance to
study a balanced statement of the good and
evil in our own nation and in the world is to
render our future citizens weak and
unprepared for the struggle of our time”
(Hanna 1948). That dedication to asking
students to wrestle with the moral
inconsistencies of U.S. history led the
issue’s authors to craft a curriculum about
Native history that radically departed from
Limerick’s well-worn ruts of U.S. West
history in textbooks. But, dedicated as the
curriculum was to the larger goals of social
studies education to promote social cohesion
and a sense of common American identity
Building America also exhibited the
difficulty of offering students an honest
examination of the inherent contradiction of
U.S. history narratives concerning Native
people. Challenging stereotype and
historical myth only to reinforce both under
the assumption of normative whiteness,
Building America took one step back for
every two steps forward. Nevertheless, the
unit offers a glimpse into the direction U.S.
history curriculum could have taken, and a

cautionary tale for would-be reformers
prone to making similar errors.

Our Minority Groups: 1. The
American Indians opens by subverting the
erasure of Native people from modern U.S.
history. Under the subheading “The
Vanishing American?” the text begins with
the legal challenge some Six Nations (the
Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, Confederacy)
members brought against the Selective
Service Act of 1940. Introducing students to
Native history by starting not with
seventeenth century lithographs but a recent
photo of Native men on the steps of a
federal courthouse powerfully challenged
the assumptions and stereotypes that
students brought to the text (Department of
Supervision and Curriculum Development,
N.E.A.. 1941, 98). The section notes that
while Six Nations members challenged the
draft, they had proudly served in the U.S.
military during World War I and their
challenge was not rooted in unwillingness to
serve, but rather the fact that compelling that
service was a violation of their sovereignty
guaranteed through the 1784 Treaty of Fort
Stanwix. In addition, the section contrasts
the Six Nations’ response with the response
from Navajo Nation, where young men
arrived at draft registration centers eager to
sign up. This opening vignette highlights the
ways in which The American Indians
represents uncharacteristically progressive
perspectives on Native people in U.S.
history curriculum. By acknowledging the
modern existence of tribal nations and their
members’ active participation in national
life, the diversity of experience, belief, and
relationships among tribal nations, and
emphasizing the struggle over sovereignty,
The American Indians presented students
with a new framework for thinking about
Native history.

Like so much progressive social
studies curricula, Building America’s
instructional goals included offering



9

students pathways for thinking about how to
live in a harmonious, diverse society. While
comparable curriculum like Rugg’s
presented Native people in modern society,
The American Indians made disrupting the
myth of the vanishing Indian its central goal.
To many people, the text reads, Native
people “are more like a race that once lived,
and died when the settlers crossed the Great
Plains in wagons… there are few subjects on
which the public holds so many mistaken
ideas as it does about the Indians” (ibid., 99).
The issue is therefore structured to present
Native people as members of modern
American society who face challenges that
are directly related to the history of U.S.
antagonism against Native nations.

The issue’s modern focus on Native
people transforms what would otherwise be
a standard narrative of Native history from
the pre-contact era through the late
nineteenth century. Instead, the sections that
focus on historical narrative reflect the
understanding that what happened in the
past continues to harm Native people in the
present. With more frankness than leading
textbooks published in the 1940s, The
American Indians notes that colonization
was rooted in injustice perpetuated against
Native nations. The pre-contact period is
likewise arranged to emphasize the diversity
of Native nations and goes to lengths,
extraordinary for textbooks of the era, to
describe that diversity in detail and highlight
the strengths of Native societies. However,
that does not preclude the issue from falling
into white supremacist narrative patterns.
While the authors took care to highlight
aspects of early Native society they found
noteworthy, the section is marred by the
racism that pervaded social studies
curriculum of the time. The text offers
descriptions of Native warfare as
particularly violent (and scapegoating “the
Sioux” in the process), claims “agriculture
came late” to Native America, and heralds

the technological contributions Europeans
brought to Native nations while mentioning
only canoes and snowshoes as technology
Native people could offer in return (ibid.,
100-3).

The sections detailing the history of
U.S. relations with Native nations are more
radical. Offering unusually nuanced
descriptions of events and their contexts,
these sections also introduced students to the
issue of tribal sovereignty. In fact, the text’s
discussion of U.S.-Native relations begins
with the 1789 Act of August which declared
“their land and property shall never be taken
from them without their consent” and
outlined the inviolable authority of treaties
with Native nations (ibid., 106). Although
the text fails to discuss the problem of
coercive and illegitimate treaties, this is
another step forward. Explicitly linking
sovereignty to land is not merely unusual for
textbooks of the 1940s, it’s unusual for
textbooks today as well. The authors
established this principle early in the issue in
order to support their later discussion of land
rights as “the most important Indian
problem” and the chief barrier to self-
sufficiency (ibid., 112).

The U.S. history sections of the issue
also contain a surprising level of detail
concerning the diversity of Native nations.
The author notes in the issue’s introduction
“it is almost impossible to talk of “the”
Indian,” and the issue’s coverage of
complicated tribal interrelationships with the
U.S. government bears that out, especially in
places like Oklahoma with the complex and
contradictory legacy of removal (ibid., 98,
106). Radically unlike other textbooks of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rather
than tout the Dawes Act of 1887 as a
triumph of assimilationist policy, The
American Indians outlines the ways in
which allotment facilitated white settler theft
of Native treaty land. The text also pulls no
punches in explaining the harm white



10

supremacy has done to Native people. In “A
Century and a Half of Trouble,” the author
argued that Native people were already
deeply religious, democratically-minded,
and virtuous in their dealings with each
other and others. Rather than depicting
assimilation as the salvation of a vanishing
race as other textbooks did, The American
Indians claimed assimilation was a violent
attempt at dehumanization, events that
America “would like to forget” (ibid., 108).
Most important, the author noted,
assimilation did not work. Native people
persisted; “the dying race would not die”
(ibid.).

From an analysis of the text and the
works listed in the bibliography, it is clear
that the author was heavily influenced by
John Collier. Commissioner of the Bureau
of Indian Affairs during the New Deal,
Collier vigorously opposed federal attempts
to use force of law to erase Native culture
and promote assimilation. Collier’s views
did not amount to full self-determination and
sovereignty, and his advocacy of Native
cultural preservation was limited by his
paternalist attitude toward Native people.
Sometimes those views had disastrous
results for Native nations, such as the
destructive livestock reduction program in
Navajo Nation, which The American Indians
presents as a success in helping Navajo
people move toward self-sufficiency.
Nevertheless, Collier’s advocacy for Native
culture, religion, practice, and social
structures shaped federal policy toward
Native nations in ways that enabled tribes to
claim greater sovereignty over their affairs
even though that sovereignty was restricted
by settler colonial claims to land and
cultural superiority. The American Indians is
a text equally torn by competing ideals,
elevating Native people and parsing myths
of American exceptionalism on the one hand,
but limited by anti-Native prejudice and the
larger goal of promoting a common

narrative of U.S. history, one that
fundamentally relies on the negation of
Native claims to land and sovereignty, on
the other.

It is in that final contradiction
between Native sovereignty and the settler
colonial history of the United States that The
American Indians falls short of being truly
revolutionary. The inclusion of an entire
section on the Indian Arts and Crafts Board
and Crow and Menominee land use
initiatives offered students in the 1940s a
more solid foundation for understanding
Native people as dynamic, modern people
than even the vague passing references to
post-1890 Native history do in textbooks
today. Yet for all its progressive
achievement, the text never quite manages
to challenge the underlying assumptions of
white supremacy that lie at the core of
injustice against Native people. As part of its
problem-solving model of pedagogy, the
issue concludes by asking students to judge
whether the Indian Reorganization Act of
1934 (IRA) was successful in nullifying
barriers to Native self-sufficiency.
Presenting opposing views of the IRA, this
inquiry rightly identifies white racism as the
true barrier to self-sufficiency. However, the
text concludes “the Indians can only become
a true part of our democracy when they and
the rest of the American people both really
desire it” (ibid., 123). It does not ask
students to consider whether becoming a
true part of American democracy is the goal
of Native people.

Presenting an extraordinarily
progressive depiction of Native history as
fully modern, diverse, and fundamentally
driven by a struggle over sovereignty, The
American Indians succeeded in asking
students to wrestle with the injustice of the
treatment of Native people under American
democracy. But in failing to ask students to
wrestle with the injustice embedded in the
founding principles of that democracy itself,



11

The American Indians missed the
opportunity to enact the deep change
necessary to correct false narratives about
Native history in U.S. history curriculum.
How progressive is Building America’s The
American Indians? The answer is two-fold.
It is both surprisingly progressive, yet not
nearly progressive enough to facilitate an
honest examination of the historical past.
The curriculum stands out dramatically
among other progressive-produced material
about Native history, yet falls prey to the
same pressures of patriotism, assimilation,
and American exceptionalism that continue
to prevent students from reconciling with
our complicated past in classrooms today.

Conclusion
Building America’s format and

methodology reflected the views of
progressive educators of its day, many of
which are still in use. Based on an analysis
of Our Minority Groups: 1. The American
Indians, the publication was also remarkably
forward thinking in its socio-political
positions. Unfortunately, it succumbed to
the tension of serving two masters. The
editorial board adopted the dual missions of
presenting both a critical and an optimistic
picture to American students. The two
missions were not always compatible, as
seen in The American Indians.

The tension may have been a result
of the rapidly changing world in which
Building America existed. The publication
was born during the Great Depression, when
many educators felt that the schools had
failed America’s youth and that they must
do more to build informed citizens equipped
with tools to take action and solve the
multitude of social and economic problems

the Depression revealed. A critical outlook
was appropriate to that task, but by the time
The American Indians was published in
1941 national needs had changed. The
nation faced the prospect of total war and
the need to unify the country for the coming
storm. In fact, the issues that preceded The
American Indians were entitled Total
Defense, Training for National Defense, and
America’s Outposts, with special focus on
U.S. territories that lay between North
America and Imperial Japan. Clearly, the
editorial board was preoccupied with
preparation for war. As is often the case,
national unification was predicated on the
assumption that the dominant culture was
normative, which meant subordination or
assimilation for others. This assumption is at
the heart of The American Indians. It is
regrettable that Building America found
itself caught between incompatible goals,
because its role as a voice for social change
was blunted by its assumption of how to
achieve national unity. Like Billy Collins’
history teacher in the poem below, the
attempt to smooth over the historical record
only perpetuates the damage.

Building America published more
than 64 issues on topics ranging from gender
and ethnic minorities to the criminal justice
system, Social Security, and urban planning.
Social critique is a cyclical, but persistent
theme in social studies education that is
enjoying a resurgence with the rise of the C3
Framework. Past experience may inform
modern approaches to grappling with
societal issues in the classroom and may
help explain why we continue to address the
same issues.

The History Teacher



12

Trying to protect his student’s innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.

And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.

The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
“How far is it from here to Madrid?”
“What do you call the matador’s hat?”

The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom
on Japan.

The children would leave his classroom
for the playground and torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,

while he gathered his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off (Collins 1999, 77-78).



13

REFERENCES

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Boydson, J.A., ed. 1986. John Dewey: The
later works, vol.9. Carbondale: Southern
Illinois Univ. Press.

Collins, Billy. 1999. Questions about angels.
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Costo, Rupert and Jeannette Henry, Eds.
1970. Textbooks and the American
Indian. San Francisco: Indian Historical
Press.

Counts, George S. 1932. Dare the schools
build a new social order? New York:
John Day.

Department of Supervision and Curriculum
Development, N.E.A.. 1941. Our minority
groups: 1. The American Indians. New
York: Americana Corp..

---. 1943. Building America: Illustrated
studies on modern problems. New York:
Americana Corp..

Elson, Ruth Miller. 1964. Guardians of
Tradition: American Schoolbooks in the
Nineteenth Century. Lincoln, NB:
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Jefferson, Thomas. 1780. Letter to George
Rogers Clark, 25 December 1780.
Founders Online. National Archives.
http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Je
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Hanna, Paul R. 1936. “General comments.”
Typewritten document. In the Hanna
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Stanford, CA.

Hanna, Paul R. 1938. Teacher participation
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Hanna, Paul R. 1948. Statement on Building
America. Typewritten document. In the
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Harap, Henry. 1970. The beginnings of the
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20 (Spring): 157-163.

Hoxie, Frederick. 1984. The Indians versus
the Textbooks: Is There Any Way Out?
Occasional Papers in Curriculum Series
no. 1. Chicago: The Newberry Library.

Kelley, Fred J. 1932. Report of the
committee on social-economic objectives.
Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual
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Limerick, Patricia Nelson. 1992. The Case
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Newman, Robert E. 1961. History of a civic
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EdD diss., Stanford University.

Rugg, Harold. 1941. That men may
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