Backroads Pragmatists. Ruben Flores
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into a national body of citizens, imported its educational institutions into the United States in the effort to solve America’s race problem, and held Mexico up as the preeminent model of cultural fusion when they had given up on America’s rhetoric of equality. Mexico was for them the leading experiment in the relationship between diversity and the nation in the industrial era, a progressive middle way between extremist politics represented by the United States on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other.
As in much of the modernizing world, industrialization and ethnic conflict were two of the central themes in U.S. and Mexican history at the beginning of the twentieth century. In both places, massive economic and political change had revived old questions about the relationship of the nation’s cultural communities to one another. In Mexico between 1920 and 1950, local communities and the state alike struggled to rebuild a united society in the wake of a devastating civil war that killed more than a million people and became the founding event of its twentieth-century history. At the same moment in the United States, early twentieth-century questions about immigration and the expansion of capital merged with the social conflicts generated by the Great Depression and World War II to produce renewed debates about the relationship of America’s peoples to one another. The black-white conflict of the New South and the place of the European immigrant in American society were only two major examples of the ethnic tensions in American society that scholars chart as fundamental to American history. By themselves, however, the social transformations taking place simultaneously in Mexico and the United States could not fully explain the conversation in the melting pot that the Americans jointly established with the Mexicans. Industrialization and ethnic conflict were not new in the twentieth century after all, and we are thus left to better comprehend why the Americans and Mexicans established a conversation with one another at this particular juncture in the history of both nations.
The international relationship in books, letters, and personal friendships developed not from the structural changes in the Mexican and U.S. economic systems alone, but from the questions that the Americans and Mexicans shared in common as they tried to make sense of those changes. In turn, the ideas of philosopher John Dewey and anthropologist Franz Boas sustained the solutions the Mexicans and the Americans offered in response to those questions, as one of the major revolutions in academic thought was sweeping through the social sciences during the early decades of the twentieth century.4 Together, the questions and answers that the Americans and Mexicans shared with one another forged an intellectual common ground that mediated their understanding of the place of diversity in the national community at a moment of heavy political and economic change in the United States and Mexico.5 Mexican educator Moisés Sáenz had studied directly under John Dewey and spread the ideas of experimentalism throughout rural Mexico in the 1920s alongside his Dewey-inspired colleague Rafael Ramírez. Simultaneously, Americans George I. Sánchez and Loyd L. Tireman were studying pragmatism under professors who had trained with Dewey at Columbia University.6 When Sánchez and Tireman arrived in Mexico to study reform work there in the early 1930s, they discovered a common intellectual ground that drew them close to the integration projects of their Mexican counterparts for the rest of their careers. A similar conversation took place under the ideas of Franz Boas, uniting the Mexicans and Americans in a mutual dialogue of cultural relativism. Together, the cluster of ideas that had revolutionized social science and their corresponding models of social practice in Mexico became fundamental examples for the Americans of how the twentieth-century industrial nation could address the riddles of social and political community presented by ethnic diversity. This international exchange in pragmatist social science and the politics of national integration has not been studied, but its importance to the questions of democracy that the Americans were asking of United States society underscores its importance to U.S. and Mexican history alike.
The Americans who believed that Mexico’s social scientists had something to teach the United States about ethnic democracy in the 1930s were transforming pragmatist philosophy and Boasian anthropology into liberal politics in remote provinces of the United States at the same time that historians Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Charles Beard were using pragmatism to build and defend the New Deal.7 But tired of government inertia in the years before Franklin D. Roosevelt rose to the presidency and of the limits of the New Deal state to transform ethnic relations afterward, these Americans turned to three characteristics of the Mexican state as a successful model of an activist government that was rebalancing the relationship of Mexico’s people to one another amid the religious, economic, and political forces of postrevolutionary Mexico.
First, they studied the administrative structure of Mexico’s federal government as the postrevolutionary state channeled financial resources into infrastructure programs, arts projects, and reconstituted agencies that were directed at creating a new unified citizenry. Although historians of Mexico have derided the colonialist impulses of Mexico’s activist government bureaucracies toward local communities after the Mexican Revolution, for these Americans, Mexico’s government interference in the politics of ethnic relations was precisely the catalyst that was needed to accelerate the rate at which Americans were blending themselves into a united group of national citizens.8 One example was the long campaign to dismantle America’s segregated public institutions. In the epic U.S. struggle between the federal and state governments, the failure of the American central state to use its government agencies to dismantle the segregated institutions of the Deep South and the American West was a fundamental theme in U.S. political culture. In the years before they began to see evidence of the federal government’s willingness to fight segregation in the United States, these Americans saw postrevolutionary Mexico as an example of government-led reform in ethnic relations.
Second, so impressed were the Americans with the educational models of Mexico’s ministry of public education that they replicated them in New Mexico, Texas, and California as the antidote to recalcitrant state governments that refused to expand public education to immigrants from Mexico and rural Americans. Exemplified in the 10,000 public schools Mexico established in the 1920s and the platoons of social reform educators it sent into the remote areas of the nation, those models of education proved fundamental for Americans who had long believed that schools were fundamental to social progress.9 Linguist Tireman copied the system of rural school supervision that Mexico’s ministry of public education had developed in the 1920s, for example, as he tried to centralize the role of the New Mexico state government in managing the state’s integration projects. As a supervisor in the system Tireman copied from Mexico, educator Marie Hughes expanded his work in New Mexico during the 1930s, and recreated Mexico’s model in Los Angeles as the postwar civil rights movement was asking new questions about the relationship of the public schools to educational integration a decade later. For founder of UCLA’s anthropology department Ralph L. Beals, meanwhile, the policy efforts of the Mexican state had resulted in educational institutions whose role in national integration could be profitably studied by American social scientists concerned to solve the riddles of ethnic conflict at home. When a federal judge asked Beals in 1945 why he was qualified to speak about efforts in southern California to integrate Mexican Americans and whites in the public schools of Orange County, Beals replied with an answer that has always stunned me: “My present personal interest,” he told the judge, “is in the problems of cultural change, as they affect the Mexican Indian in relation to the educational and social programs of the Mexican government.”10
Third, the institutions of scientific research that postrevolutionary Mexican social theory had helped to spawn helped the Americans with questions they had formulated about immigrant assimilation in the United States. Paul S. Taylor, Emory Bogardus, and Herschel T. Manuel began writing the first academic monographs about immigrant Mexicans to the United States in the 1930s, seeking answers to the same questions that had perplexed generations of thinkers before them: the incorporation of the immigrant child in the public schools, the assimilation processes of American communities, and the differences between varieties of immigrant waves to America.11 But for the American psychologists and social reformers who saw Mexico as the progressive example for the United States, including Montana Hastings and Catherine Vesta Sturges, it was Mexico’s postrevolutionary projects in national integration that provided the primary source of social theory as they struggled to understand the immigrant’s place in American society. Mexico’s postrevolutionary government had institutionalized