Backroads Pragmatists. Ruben Flores
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department of anthropology at Columbia for training in understanding “culture,” helping in the process to create the anthropological tradition of twentieth-century Mexican social science. It was the growing relationship between Columbia University and the postrevolutionary Mexican state that Puig Casauranc’s 1926 visit to Columbia University symbolized, even as public officials elsewhere seemed to pay more attention to Mexico’s economic relationship to the United States. After 1926, the links between Mexico City and Columbia University became more public, transformed by government administrators in Mexico from philosophical platforms for integrating the ethnic groups of the nation into political celebrations of administrative collaboration across North America. In the aftermath of Puig Casauranc’s visit to Columbia in 1926, John Dewey would lecture at UNAM in a summer tour that the Mexican ministry of education celebrated in its official propaganda. Famed Columbia University education theorist Isaac Leon Kandel would study Mexico’s educational system beginning in 1927 for a series of new articles on secondary education in Latin America and Europe. Nicholas Butler Murray would fete Casauranc in New York, initiating a correspondence that would last more than twenty years. Columbia University’s relationship with Mexico extended beyond these immediate personal links, as well, to scholarly associations that were themselves trying to extend the ideas at work in Teachers College throughout the continent. The Progressive Education Association maintained a relationship with Mexico’s ministry of education, for example, based on Dewey’s growing influence in Mexico’s rural provinces.64
One important corollary effect of Columbia’s influence on Mexico has gone unnoticed in the scholarship on the postrevolutionary state. While scholars of Mexican history have long known that Franz Boas and John Dewey were large influences on postrevolutionary Mexican statecraft, they have not noted that it was from the career of pragmatism in Mexico that Sánchez and other Americans fashioned their experiments in assimilation for the 1930s United States.65 It was from the Mexican pole of pragmatist ideas that assimilation projects in the American West took many of their important clues about the role of the state and education in social change. This relationship was not accidental, but a by-product of the fact that the Americans had themselves trained in the public universities of the American West in the same set of ideas the Mexicans had learned at Columbia University. Sánchez’s dissertation had depended on Dewey’s Democracy and Education, for example, while New Mexican Loyd Tireman, who traveled to Mexico in 1931, had depended on Dewey’s How We Think.66 Both sets of scholars, not only the Mexicans, were using pragmatism as a platform for social reform. Americans and Mexicans made an important intellectual connection with one another in the 1930s that made a difference to American political history because they were each wrestling with the challenge of translating Deweyan and Boasian ideas from the world of philosophy to the world of politics.67
Figure 4. John Dewey (third from right) in Mexico City in 1926, when he lectured at UNAM at the behest of his former student, SEP subsecretary Moisés Sáenz (standing, second from left). Dewey’s visit symbolized the transmission of pragmatist ideas from Columbia University to Mexico City’s government ministries in the twenty years after the Mexican Revolution. Archivo General de la Nación, Centro de Información Gráfica, Archivo Fotográfico Enrique Díaz, Delgado y García, Curso de verano de 1926.
This link in social science between Mexico’s state builders and the Americans who would go on to help shape the American civil rights movement was more than a curiosity of modernist ideas. Instead, it converted Gamio’s and Sáenz’s application of science to social philosophy in postrevolutionary Mexico into a fulcrum of institutional experimentation for rural Americans who had sought the solutions to modern ethical conflict in The Mind of Primitive Man and Democracy and Education. As the Americans took note of the political projects that Gamio and Sáenz had designed, they used them to engender a political relationship with the Mexicans. And as they helped to spread pragmatism’s reach into the back alleys and dirt roads of the American West, Mexico’s experiments shaped the American response to ethnic conflict in the United States. In the context of the United States, New Deal advocates like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Rexford Tugwell would later argue that pragmatism had become a philosophical basis for the New Deal state.68 But because the transfer of Deweyan ideas for use by the state came a decade earlier in Mexico, it was a foreign pole of administrative activity from which American intellectuals in the American West took their cue for the transformation of American society in the 1930s. Not pragmatism in the United States but pragmatism in Mexico became the model for institutional experimentalism in the American West.
The Mexican social scientists reflected the thrill of discovering that the Americans had recognized their philosophical departures in social reconstruction when the Americans returned home to write about the postrevolutionary state. “[George Sánchez] places in the hands of the spectator the eyeglasses of history, to the end that the reader may perceive with full clarity all the scenes as they succeed one another on the Mexican stage,” wrote one Mexican official who followed Deweyan philosophy after the Mexican Revolution.69 Here was an allusion to the importance of history and context as the guiding rationale of the modernist movement of ideas of which pragmatism was a part.70 Meanwhile, the Americans most often recorded their appreciation for Mexico’s use of those ideas through allusions in their work to the institutional implications of the social analyses that the Mexicans had produced. “As one looks back on [Mexico’s rural] experiments,” wrote Loyd Tireman, “he is impressed with the ways in which the Mexican government has attacked [its social] problems.”71 Ralph Beals was more explicit:
Mexico especially offers an unusually good opportunity for studies in the applied field, both for suggesting action programs and for examining the results of programs. The active interference of governmental agencies in Mexico in the native mixed culture has of late often been in accordance with definite concepts of social problem and structure. Study of the effects of government programs should be fruitful both in testing theories and formulating programs.72
Sánchez, meanwhile, compared Mexico’s reform projects to the missionary zeal of the sixteenth-century mendicant friars. “Their function and methods of procedure have varied from time to time, owing to their exploratory character and their ability to adapt to changing conditions.”73 Dewey himself had been impressed with Mexico’s schools as institutions of social transformation during his 1926 visit there: “there is no educational movement in the world which exhibits more of the spirit of intimate union of school activities with those of the community than is found in [Mexico],” he wrote.74
The link in Dewey and Boas between the Americans and the Mexicans extended beyond the period of the 1930s and into the civil rights era after World War II. It attuned the Americans to Mexico’s postrevolutionary experiments not for a period of one or two years, but for decades, making Mexico an example for renewed social relations in the United States that extended into the late 1950s. It connected the rural experiments in progressive education in Mexico to rural experiments in progressive education in the United States, providing the Americans with models of interethnic relations that became a canonical part of their construction of the American melting pot. And it provided one of the most visceral examples of a long-held tenet of Deweyan pragmatism. Rather than being an arcane set of experiments in academic social science, the connection to Mexico represented Dewey’s maxim that the role of philosophy in the modern era was instrumental. If the role of philosophy represented, as Dewey believed, the use of lived experience as part of the search for ways to transform the violence, contradictions, and destructiveness of industrial society, no one was trying harder to institutionalize those ideas than the circle of Americans and Mexicans who found commonality with one another for the three decades between 1920 and 1950 across the international boundary that separated their nations.75
The philosophical shift in Mexico that Gamio and Sáenz represented broadens our understanding of the transatlantic geography of progressive statecraft. Recent work in American intellectual history has illuminated the philosophical and political relationships that connected modernist American thinkers to their European counterparts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The via media of James Kloppenberg,