Corinne Seeds (1889-1969) was the principal of the Training
School of the University of California, Southern Branch (1925). In 1929, the
school was renamed the University Elementary School (UES), and in the late
1940s, the school moved to the UCLA campus with the first permanent UES
buildings opening in 1950. She retired in1957. In 1982, the school was renamed
the Corinne A. Seeds University
Elementary School in her honor. The UCLA research library houses a collection of historical materials, scrapbooks, sample units of work,
publications and studies, and photographs relating to Seeds' work at the
UCLA University Elementary School.
She became principal of the
Training School of the fledgling University of California, Southern Branch,
located on North Vermont Ave. in Los Angeles; in 1929, Seeds and the Training
School moved to its first Westwood location on Warner Ave., and the school was
renamed the University Elementary School (UES); in the late 1940s the school
moved to the UCLA campus, and the first permanent UES buildings opened in 1950;
Seeds retired as principal of UES in 1957; she died in 1969; in 1982, the
school was renamed the Corinne A. Seeds University Elementary School in her
honor.
Notes: Corinne was
born 3 July 1899 in Colorado Springs, CO. She lived with her parents while in
school in Pasadena, CA and later in Westwood. When Corinne was 50 years old she is found in the 1940 census living with her parents on Hobart
Street, Westwood, CA. She died 15 March 1969. SS
550-70-2125
Corinne knew Dewey and took his philosophy to California
where she became the principal of the University Elementary School or
UES. In fact she walked and talked with Dewey and became a keen disciple of his his philosophy. Corinne believed in using the interests of children as a springboard to deep learning. Under Seeds the curriculum revolved around Social Studies. Children studied the community or the gold rush or American Indians. Subjects like math and writing came as students needed them in their culture study.
She wrote one book - a collection of photos and poems of her students. She taught education at UCLA and was a champion of progressive education. She will be fondly remembered by the teachers who took her class and the students she mentored.
She is a perfect example of the following couplet: it is better to go a mile deep than an inch deep and a mile wide.
Notes:
Seeds was born in 1889; in 1925, she became principal of the Training School of the fledgling University of California, Southern Branch, located on North Vermont Ave. in Los Angeles; in 1929, Seeds and the Training School moved to its first Westwood location on Warner Ave., and the school was renamed the University Elementary School (UES); in the late 1940s the school moved to the UCLA campus, and the first permanent UES buildings opened in 1950; Seeds retired as principal of UES in 1957; she died in 1969; in 1982, the school was renamed the Corinne A. Seeds University Elementary School in her honor.
Notes:
Corinne Seeds (1889-1969)was the principal of the Training School of the University of California, Southern Branch (1925). In 1929, the school was renamed the University Elementary School (UES), and in the late 1940s, the school moved to the UCLA campus with the first permanent UES buildings opening in 1950. She retired in 1957. In 1982, the school was renamed the Corinne A. Seeds University Elementary School in her honor. The collection consists of biographical and historical materials, scrapbooks, sample units of work, publications and studies, and photographs relating to Seeds' work at the UCLA University Elementary School.
She wrote one book - a collection of photos and poems of her students. She taught education at UCLA and was a champion of progressive education. She will be fondly remembered by the teachers who took her class and the students she mentored.
She is a perfect example of the following couplet: it is better to go a mile deep than an inch deep and a mile wide.
Notes:
Seeds was born in 1889; in 1925, she became principal of the Training School of the fledgling University of California, Southern Branch, located on North Vermont Ave. in Los Angeles; in 1929, Seeds and the Training School moved to its first Westwood location on Warner Ave., and the school was renamed the University Elementary School (UES); in the late 1940s the school moved to the UCLA campus, and the first permanent UES buildings opened in 1950; Seeds retired as principal of UES in 1957; she died in 1969; in 1982, the school was renamed the Corinne A. Seeds University Elementary School in her honor.
Notes:
Corinne Seeds (1889-1969)was the principal of the Training School of the University of California, Southern Branch (1925). In 1929, the school was renamed the University Elementary School (UES), and in the late 1940s, the school moved to the UCLA campus with the first permanent UES buildings opening in 1950. She retired in 1957. In 1982, the school was renamed the Corinne A. Seeds University Elementary School in her honor. The collection consists of biographical and historical materials, scrapbooks, sample units of work, publications and studies, and photographs relating to Seeds' work at the UCLA University Elementary School.
 | California (1963) |
|---|
1900 census
1910 census
1920 census
1930 census
1940 census
1416 Holmby, Corinne and her parents lived here:
1931
1935
1937 Nov 9 Yuma Sun:
1942
1946 Corinne
1946 Zanevill Ohio Signal March 28
1947
1949 UCLA Yearbook
1955 UCLA Catalogue
1956 July 15, LA Times
1956
1957 LA Times April 16
Research
Book Overview
Helen
Heffernan and Corinne Seeds were nationally recognized as leaders of the
progressive education movement and were key figures in what was
probably the most concerted attempt to put the ideals of progressive
education into practice in a state-wide system of public education in
the United States. This book examines the struggle over public education
in mid-twentieth century America through the lens of a joint biography
of these two extraordinary women, Heffernan, the California Commissioner
of Rural and Elementary Education between 1926 and 1965, and Seeds, the
Director of the University Elementary school at UCLA between 1925 and
1957.
photo of the book mentioned above:
Corinne Seeds and the Avenue 21 School: Towards a Sensuous History of Citizenship Education
Kathleen Weiler
In September 1911, a young graduate of the Los Angeles
Normal School, Corinne Seeds, took a teaching job at the Avenue 21 School in
one of the poorer areas of Los Angeles. Three years later, in 1914, she was
made principal of the Avenue 21 Evening School for Adults, a position she held
until 1920. Seeds later became the principal of the University Elementary
School at UCLA and a nationally recognized leader in the progressive education
movement. Corinne Seeds was one of thousands of young White native-born women
teachers who taught in urban public schools and citizenship programs in the
first two decades of the twentieth century. She described her years teaching
immigrant and poor children and adults at the Avenue 21 School in an oral
history interview conducted in the early 1960s. In this oral history, she
provides an unusually vivid picture of her experiences. What does her narrative
suggest about the role of public schools, the experiences of immigrant
children, the work of white women teachers in this key period? How should we
read her story?
Seeds’ narrative provides evidence of the citizenship and
literacy programs in public school systems during the great wave of immigration
to North America in the early twentieth century. These new immigrants from
Eastern and Southern Europe, Asia, and Mexico differed in language, religion, and
“race” from the English-speaking Anglo-Saxons who made up the majority
population and who held political and economic power. As P.P. Claxton, U.S.
Commissioner of Immigration for the Department of the Interior, noted in 1913:
Most of the immigrants in recent years have little kinship
with the older stocks of our population, either in blood, language, methods of
thought, traditions, manners, or customs; they know little of our political and
social life and are unused to our social ideals; their environment here is
wholly different from that to which they have been accustomed.[1]
These immigrants made their journey in a period of rapid
technological and economic change—indeed the technological innovations of the
time made their migration possible. When they arrived in Canada and the United
States, they entered societies in transformation—from rural to urban, from
small-scale businesses to corporate capitalism, from a technology based on
face-to-face encounters to one defined by distance through the inventions of
the telegraph, telephone, automobile, and movies. And they were societies
fundamentally organized by racism, in which ideas of race meant privilege or
oppression, connotations of goodness and evil.[2] In this world, the
appearance of these very “foreign” foreigners raised anxieties and created the
perception of social crisis. Their language, their customs, their very bodies
challenged what was defined as normal and proper. In both Canada and the United
States, settlement houses, schools, and literacy programs were envisioned as a
means of creating responsible citizens from these disparate and suspicious
groups.[3] In both countries, native-born White women worked as teachers
and social workers at the intersection of gender, class, and race, symbolizing
at the same time the power of whiteness and the subordination of womanhood.[4]
Seeds’ narrative reveals the complexity of this encounter.
As in other North American cities, the moral panic over
immigration in Los Angeles in the early twentieth century led to the
establishment of programs to educate new citizens. These programs, which
attracted immigrants, Mexican-Americans, and African-Americans, offered
literacy classes as well as language and citizenship classes leading to
naturalization. And, as was true in other cities, Americanization in Los
Angeles depended on the work of women. Historians have analyzed the role of
White, native-born women in the Americanization movement in the context of
their involvement in progressive social reform more broadly—in the settlement
house movement, the women’s club movement, government agencies such as the
Children’s Bureau, and, of course, the suffrage movement.[5] As numerous
historians have noted, women reformers of this period tended to focus on the
needs of women and children, thus in some sense remaining safely within the
domestic sphere even when they were working in the very public sphere of the
state. In her study of women and social reform, Robyn Muncy calls this a
“female dominion” of child welfare policy and reform.[6] In the early
twentieth century women’s caretaking role was expanded to immigrants—adults as
well as children. In the United States, such figures as Frances Kellor,
vice-chair of the National Americanization Committee, and Josephine Roche, head
of the Division of Work with the Foreign Born during the First World War in the
Wilson administration, helped set and administer national policy.[7] In
California, women were key figures behind the passage of the California Home
Teacher Act of 1915, which focused on educating women about public health and
the need for good drinking water, fresh milk, baths, and proper child care.[8]
In Los Angeles, women, many of whom had participated in the
settlement house movement, were central to the development of Americanization
programs.[9] The work of these women demonstrates a number of
contradictions around race and gender, contradictions that were present in the
Americanization movement nationwide. Americanization teachers were meant to
teach the newcomers a belief in democracy and to integrate them into American
society.[10] The women teachers were almost exclusively white, while
those they were “Americanizing” were seen as nonwhite, or, in the case of
Jewish and Southern European immigrants, as slightly less than white. Given the
highly racialized discourse and racist practices of the times, this racial
dynamic shaped the relationships between teachers and students in terms of both
power and perception. The exchange between teachers and students also reflected
the ironies of gender. At first, students in the early Americanization programs
being instructed in citizenship were immigrant men; and, as John McClymer
points out, Americanization primers and other materials used in literacy and
citizenship classes “were invariant in their portrayal of the public domain of
American life as an all-male preserve.”[11] Yet the native-born women
who were instructing these immigrant men in the duties of citizenship were not
only absent from the depictions of public life in the materials they taught,
but were themselves denied full rights of citizenship until 1920, when national
women’s suffrage was achieved.
When Americanization programs turned to immigrant women,
they were primarily envisioned either as domestic workers or as mothers.[12]
Immigrant mothers were seen as centrally important in providing stable homes and
teaching children “American” values. In her defence of the Home Teacher Act,
for example, Mary Gibson, a member of the elite Los Angeles Friday Morning
Club, widow of a banker, Los Angeles School Board member, and founding member
of the California Commission on Immigration and Housing, argued: “Upon the
women, brave enough and strong enough to win their own political emancipation,
rests the responsibility of the education and protection of these alien women; and
to so establish and sustain the mother in her own domain, is to protect the
state from delinquent children and an ignorant vote.”[13] In her 1918
“Primer” for immigrant women, Amanda Chase warned: “Do not let your child be
tardy. If you do, when he grows up he will be late at his work. Thus he will
lose his job and always be poor and miserable.”[14] And in her 1929
pamphlet, “Americanization through Homemaking,” Pearl Ellis argued that the
Mexican mother should be taught to establish values and attitudes that would
help her raise a son who would be “more dependable and less revolutionary in
his tendencies…The homekeeper creates the atmosphere, whether it be one of
harmony and cooperation or of dissatisfaction and revolt.”[15] Ruby
Baughman, supervisor for immigrant education in Los Angeles, described
immigrant women as “timid woman-creatures” who “would not—and often could
not—seek the school for education; the school must seek them.”[16] The
relationship between native-born white women and immigrant women implied in
Baughman’s comment is similar to Gibson’s argument about the “responsibility”
of the native-born teacher to “sustain” the immigrant mother in order to
“protect the state.” And then there is the thesis of George Sanchez, who ties
the education of immigrant Mexican women to white society’s desire for docile
domestic workers, arguing that both the ideology of the dependable, loyal
worker and the emphasis on household affairs in Americanization programs for
Mexican women was intended to produce “domestic servants, seamstresses,
laundresses, and service workers in the Southwest.”[17]
Although the Americanization movement depicted the work of
teachers as transforming foreigners into responsible citizens and thus
contributing to nation building, teaching in Americanization programs was not
necessarily a selfless activity. For many if not most women teachers it was a
means of employment and a source of some public power. As Gayle Gullett
comments, the actions of these woman Americanizers were “at least partially
self-serving,” since by claiming a right to instruct immigrant women,
“organized women thus created a political role for themselves as managers of
other women’s homes.”[18] Yet the progressive reform impetus—the desire
to help those seen as less fortunate, to extend what were seen as the benefits
of “being American” to newcomers, to educate the illiterate—also emerges in the
accounts of women in the Americanization movement.[19] Corinne Seeds’
narrative of her years working at the Avenue 21 evening night school in Los
Angeles provides one example of the complex and contradictory workings of race,
gender, and political idealism in the work of women Americanizers.
But Seeds’ narrative can also be seen as evidence of how
bodies express social hierarchies, how they respond to cultural and social
change and the intrusion of difference. Memories of physical responses, of
objects and space, may reveal more than words. In a recent article in the Canadian
Historical Review, Joy Parr asks, “is a sensuous history within reach?”
What Parr is calling for is an exploration of the bodily knowledge of
historical figures, an attempt to understand their experience at a deeper level
than the level of abstract language. Parr suggests that our bodies live out
power-laden social relationships and cultural meanings, that they respond to
the intrusion of difference in ways outside of language. Thus, she argues, we
should seek to understand the “situated, material bodies” of historical
actors.[20] Seeds’ story thus can be read as evidence both of the
conditions and practices in public schools and of citizenship programs in this
period, but it also tells us about the way one young white woman embodied her
role as the teacher and civilizer of the strangers, the others, the foreign.
Reading Corinne Seeds’ Narrative
Corrine Seeds began her teaching career at the Mira Monte
School in 1911 as a young graduate of the Los Angeles Normal School. In 1911,
Mira Monte was a Los Angeles County school, outside the city limits south of
Watts. Los Angeles had experienced explosive growth in the period between the
1890s and early 1900s. Between 1890 and 1909 its population increased from
50,000 to 319,000 and by 1909 it trailed only San Francisco as a Western
manufacturing centre, surpassing Seattle, Portland, and Denver.[21] In
his classic book on the history of Los Angeles, Robert Fogelson uses
fragmentation as the dominant metaphor for the emerging city, a metaphor which
captures not only the geographical reality of the city, with its decentralized
suburbs and reliance on automobiles, but its cultural and social life as well.
Unlike the case in Eastern cities, the majority of newcomers to Los Angeles in
the years before 1920 were White, native-born Americans from the East and
Mid-West. In 1900, approximately twenty per cent of the residents of Los
Angeles were foreign-born, but of these foreign-born residents over
three-quarters were from Northern Europe or Canada. By 1920, however, the
city’s population increasingly included immigrants from Southern Europe, Japan,
and Mexico, along with native-born African Americans moving from the South in
an internal migration. Although Los Angeles did not experience as dramatic an
influx of immigrants and internal migrants as did New York, Chicago, or even
San Francisco, nonetheless concerns over “foreigners” were as widespread in Los
Angeles as anywhere else in the country in this period. By 1920, just over
forty per cent of children in the public schools were foreign born or had
foreign-born parents.[22]
Conceptions of race divided Los Angeles. Immigrants from
Asia and Mexico were discriminated against and segregated, as were
African-Americans. Although Los Angeles was presented in the Black press as a
relatively open city racially before the 1920s, at least in comparison with the
South and Northeast, discrimination and racism against African-Americans marked
social and cultural life. It is true that the rapid expansion of the city
offered the possibility for African-Americans to buy land and build and own
their own homes, but discrimination in employment and racial covenants in real
estate faced African-Americans in Los Angeles as in the rest of the United
States.[23] Most immigrants, many African-Americans, and many “Mexicans”
(a term that encompassed both those of Mexican descent born in the United
States and immigrants from Mexico) lived in an older section of the city known
as the foreign district—“an area stretching from the original pueblo, across
the river, east to Boyle Heights, then running along the railroad tracks down
Central Avenue and San Pedro Street.”[24] Living conditions in the
foreign district were dreadful.[25]
Seeds’ description of Mira Monte, her first school, shows
her sharp awareness of the lines of social difference that shaped Southern
California. According to Seeds, “Negroes weren’t in this district, but some of
the bandits and people who were not allowed in Los Angeles City had moved
there. There were also some of the finest people I ever met, you know, working
people, lovely people—I mean, like my folks.”[26] In this comment on her
first teaching position Seeds constructs the world of working people using two
of the categories she will use throughout her life: on the one hand, “the
bandits,” those she saw as dangerous and other, and on the other, the “lovely”
working people, with whom she identified. After two years at Mira Monte, Seeds
moved to the Avenue 21 School, a city school on the east bank of the Los
Angeles River, “two blocks from the railroad yard,” where she taught fifth and
sixth grade. Seeds presents the Avenue 21 School as mixed by race and class.
“From the river bed, there were all kinds—Mexicans, and, particularly,
Italians—while from the north of Highland Park Avenue and from Pasadena Avenue
there were the children of the aristocratic old people of Los Angeles. So, we
had quite a mixture there.”[27] Here Seeds introduces the third category
she will continue to use, “the aristocratic old people,” the wealthy and
powerful, whose children she would later teach at the University Elementary
School. The principal of the Avenue 21 School was a woman, which was common in
the Los Angeles elementary schools of this period. Of twenty-three teachers at
the school listed in the 1919 Los Angeles School Directory, twenty-one were
women, including Corinne Seeds, who then taught sixth grade. The two men on the
faculty taught agriculture and manual training.[28]
In her second year at the Avenue 21 School, when she was
twenty-four years old, Seeds was made principal of the adult night school, a
typical example of the adult schools in Los Angeles in these years. The focus
of the curriculum was literacy and citizenship training, but the school served
as a community centre as well. Although there had been a few evening classes
for illiterates in the Los Angeles schools beginning in the 1880s, organized
programs for foreigners did not get under way until after the turn of the
twentieth century and only became firmly established after the creation of the
California Commission of Immigration and Housing in 1913.[29] Between
1911 and 1915 enrolment in LA adult evening schools almost tripled. These
programs, which attracted immigrants, Mexican-Americans, and African-Americans,
offered literacy classes as well as language and citizenship courses leading to
naturalization.[30] Although I have not found a description of the
specific course offerings and activities of the Avenue 21 adult night school,
they were no doubt similar to other Los Angeles adult night schools. The nearby
Ann Street adult night school, for example, offered formal classes, movies on
Friday nights, dances with jazz bands, and a Mexican Club, and housed a home
teacher who taught hygiene and nutrition.[31] As the principal of the
Avenue 21 adult night school, Seeds was responsible for overseeing a similar
range of activities, including both the formal curriculum of Americanization and
literacy classes and recreational programs and social activities for the entire
community. As was typical of the adult night schools, the Avenue 21 School had
been originally established for the Americanization of immigrants, but in
practice it attracted poor residents of all kinds.
Schools like the Avenue 21 adult night school were meant to
transform foreigners into Americans through formal programs. One major theme in
Americanization programs was unquestioning acceptance of the existing economic and
political system. In this way, Americanization programs were presented as
protecting society as a whole from the danger of political subversion or crime.
The 1915 Annual Report of the California Commission on Immigration and Housing,
for example, warned: “Unguided and unprotected, he [the immigrant] is liable to
become a menace. The correction of these evils is no more than a matter of our
own self protection.”[32] What was at stake in immigrant education,
noted the 1920 Bureau of Education Bulletin, “Training Teachers for
Americanization,” was not just “a matter of schooling alone. It is much more
than this. The immigrant is becoming either Americanized or anarchized by every
experience he undergoes, every condition to which he is subjected.”[33]
But if there are references to the dangers of being “anarchized” in these documents,
there is virtually no acknowledgement of the possible reasons for
dissatisfaction or unrest—exploitative and dangerous working conditions, the
denial of citizenship or membership in this imagined American community to ten
per cent of the native-born U.S. population because of their race and to over
half because of their gender. Nor is there any indication of the mass social
movements of the time—the anti-lynching campaign, the suffrage movement, union
organizing and strikes, the electoral support for Eugene Debs and the
Socialists.
Although the founders of the Americanization schools in
large part ignored the realities of American racism and the power of class, at
times these tensions break through the official accounts. Ruby Baughman’s 1919
report on elementary adult education programs in Los Angeles reveals some of
these realities. When Baughman suggests that Americanization teachers hold
social events as a means of building community, she also warns, “The type of
recreation depends, too, on the existing racial or social barriers and the
kinds and degrees of prejudice resulting therefrom. Lectures, concerts,
moving-pictures are not infrequently possible where other more intimate forms
of association are barred.”[34] These racial and social barriers, this
“prejudice,” makes claims of the creation of a common American community
uncertain to say the least. Consider Baughman’s description of one school in a
“thoroughly cosmopolitan neighborhood, composed mostly of American
wage-earners, but having a sprinkling of well-to-do families who look with
utter contempt upon their less fortunate neighbors, foreign, colored, and even
the laboring class of Americans.”[35] Baughman gives no advice as to how
Americanizers were to deal with the “utter contempt” of these privileged
native-born Whites.
If Americanization materials seldom acknowledge the depths
of racism in American society, they are also striking in their failure to
acknowledge immigrant ethnic or religious community groups—the groups that, in
practice, provided the strongest collective expression and support for the
immigrants. As Linda Gordon argues, the relationship between the state and
groups envisioned as needy was not completely controlled by the state; Gordon
argues that in many situations groups and individuals negotiated their
interaction with state agencies to meet their own needs.[36] Judith
Raftery’s study of schools and communities in Los Angeles in the period
1885-1941 makes a similar point. Raftery argues that immigrant groups expressed
their own self-determination by making demands for more educational services
from the city school board, “requests for additional services, such as rooms to
conduct native language classes, after-school playgrounds, or auditoriums for
national celebrations, and, in most cases, the board granted the requests.”[37]
Ruby Baughman’s account supports this view that families
were supportive of programs in which they participated themselves:
Our most successful evenings have been those in which the
program was given by the people themselves or their children. No matter how
simple the event, the crowd was larger and more appreciative than when a noted
person was brought out from town—proving again that what people do for
themselves means far more to them than that which is done for them.[38]
By the early 1920s local schools allowed Mexican groups to
use school auditoriums to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, African-Americans to hold meetings
of the NAACP, Russian and Japanese cultural organizations to hold meetings on
school grounds. Individual students in Americanization programs used the
offerings of the schools for their own ends as well, particularly citizenship
classes which could be used toward naturalization. And literacy programs
frequently attracted native-born African-Americans or Mexican-Americans who had
not benefited from public schooling and who were discriminated against in a
racist society. Thus the intent of Americanization might be control,
assimilation, and social discipline, but both immigrants and native groups
could use the programs and institutional spaces for other ends. Moreover,
although advocates of Americanization seemed to assume that only through
organized programs and classes would immigrants learn “how to be American,” of
course immigrants were powerfully attracted to American popular culture—to
baseball, movies, radio, and jazz—a process of cultural identity formation that
was taking place across a wide spectrum of society, not just in formal
classrooms or programs.
Seeds’ account of her years teaching at the Avenue 21 School
captures many of the contradictions inherent in Americanization programs. One
of the most striking aspects of her narrative is the contradiction between her
sympathetic view of her students and their community and her sense of her own
race privilege. One of the dominant themes in her account is her respect for
her students and their families as hard-working people. This strong sympathy
doubtless reflects her own family upbringing. Her father was a carpenter, a
union member with a strong labour consciousness. Her narrative often shows a
recognition of how hard people work and a sense of compassion for working
people. For example, here is her description of teenagers who had to attend the
night school because they worked during the day:
Now, the night school was established mainly for the people
who wished to become citizens, but there was also a group of children who had
to work in the daytime. Most of them drove milk carts in the morning—getting up
way early. Oh, they were God-forsaken bunch of young people—teenagers, you
know. Those under eighteen (fourteen to eighteen) had to attend night school.
Those poor kids! What we taught them was nil.[39]
Seeds not only calls them “those poor kids,” but she
understands the nature of their work and what it must mean in terms of a
physical toll on them. It is no wonder that what the teachers taught them was
probably “nil.”
But Seeds’ sympathy for the working class is mixed with a
sense of her own cultural superiority, often expressed around racial
difference. For example, consider this description of the students who came to
the night school: “Oh, they were funny people—old Negroes, you know, that
wanted to learn to read, and all those poor tired people that came to get their
citizenship papers.”[40] Her use of the word “tired” here to me implies a
recognition of their hard physical work. They are not just “those poor people,”
but “poor tired people,” tired, because they are working at exhausting
working-class jobs. And yet, what does Seeds mean by the word “funny,” when she
describes “old Negroes” who wanted to learn to read? It is hard to understand
what Seeds could have meant here—surely not amusing, not odd. The word “funny”
echoes other passages in her oral history dealing with African-Americans. She
notes of one African-American man: He “didn’t have any brains at all; he was a
clown.”[41] She often uses Black dialect when she describes
African-American speech, a choice that gives an effect of naïveté or cultural
lack. Or consider this comment she attributes to her father: “My father said
that, when these five [African-American men] came to night school, it was like a
comic opera to see them coming up the steps.”[42] In using these
terms—comic, clown, funny—Seeds employs the familiar and demeaning cultural
image of Sambo, of the simple Black man. She is speaking through a racist
discourse that positions her as superior and makes childlike (and therefore
unthreatening) the African-American men she taught. She does not refer to any
other ethnicity in these terms.
Another example of the complexity of Seeds’ racial and
cultural positioning is shown in the following passage in which she describes
her work teaching “poor old Mexicans,” whom she “loved.”
I loved the people though, and I even went and taught in the
box cars where they brought the poor old Mexicans. They lived in the box cars,
while they worked for almost nothing in the canning factory. That’s what we
were doing in those days—importing those poor people and exploiting them. The
women would sit on the steps, and in the summer I tried to recruit them. I
spent six weeks of my time for two whole summers wearing white dresses that Mother
kept washed and ironed all the time. I would sit on the steps with an Italian
woman, maybe help her to know a few words, and try to keep them out of the
hands of the people that exploited them. I even begged the canning factory man
to let me teach some English to the men, but he worked them ten hours and often
kept them afterward.[43]
Here Seeds is explicit about the brutal working conditions
of these immigrants: “That’s what we were doing in those days, importing those
poor people and exploiting them.” They worked “for almost nothing.” And she
uses the term “exploited” again when she describes her attempt to teach the
Italian women English, “to keep them out of the hands of the people that
exploited them.” The men were unable to attend a literacy class she wanted to
teach because of the long hours imposed upon them by their floor boss. And yet
even in this sympathetic picture, Seeds inserts the sentence about wearing a
clean, white dress each day, one her mother washed and ironed for her. What is
the meaning of this clean white dress?
One of the most striking themes in the Americanization
materials is the trope of cleanliness and domesticity. The interest in hygiene and
sanitation in public school curricula has often been pointed to as an example
of the totalizing intent of Americanization to transform both children and
their parents by cleansing them of their ethnicity through cleansing their
bodies. While the social disciplining of bodies is clearly evident in this
rhetoric of cleanliness, it is also important to examine the material results
of the progressive advocacy of public health programs. In Los Angeles, the
progressive era saw the introduction of school nurses, yearly physical
examinations for schoolchildren, and penny lunches, first made available in
1909.[44] By the late 1920s, the results of these public health
campaigns were dramatic. George Sanchez points out:
Hygiene saved children’s lives, and milk made them much
healthier. In 1923, when the rate of infant death before one year of age for
Mexicans in Los Angeles stood at 250.3 per 1,000, or about one in four, the
county initiated an intensive program of maternal and infant hygiene. By 1929
the rate had fallen to 104.5, or about one in ten.[45]
Although this rate remained about double that of the White
population, this was still a remarkable improvement in only six years. Thus the
progressive reform impetus that underlay Americanization meant not only the
imposition of cultural values, but, as John McClymer points out, it was “also a
matter of prevention of exploitation, of good housing, of clean milk for
babies, of adequate wages, of satisfactory industrial conditions, of the spirit
of neighborliness between Americans, old and new.”[46]
But if public health programs provided real benefits, the
rhetoric around them reveals the depth of a racialized discourse that equated
foreignness, dirt, and corruption. Disorder and dirt were signs not only of
foreignness, but of moral degeneracy. Ruby Baughman’s 1919 report of Americanization
programs in Los Angeles, Elementary Adult Education, for example,
describes a class of fifteen Mexican women from a Southern Pacific railroad
camp:
In order to have a good meeting place for the class one
woman cleaned up her house and rearranged the furniture to make more room. The
teacher was tremendously encouraged when another mother brought in her baby
whom she had taught to say, “I sweep, I scrub, I mop,” vigorously gesticulating
with the broom and the mop as she went.[47]
Baughman’s description of English classes at the Pullman Car
Cleaning plant in Los Angeles provides another example of this conflation of
cleanliness and Americanism. According to Baughman’s account, women who worked
as cleaners for Pullman Cars were unable to attend evening school, so the
Americanization teacher arranged to have them study on the lunch break. After
noticing the progress made by the women, the foreman asked for an evening class
for men in a nearby camp. Baughman continues:
The “camp” is a group of neighboring houses all occupied by
workmen engaged in Pullman Car cleaning. When they found that a teacher would
be provided, the men under the leadership of the foreman, went to work with a
will. They cleared the only available room in their camp, which was the
basement of one of the houses. It was cleaned until it shone, fresh new paper
was put on the walls, and the floor covered with rugs. The men themselves built
tables, chairs, and benches, and every convenience that they could think of was
installed. Although their work during the war period has been very heavy, owing
to the extra work of cleaning troop trains, these men have persisted. Seven of
them have not missed an evening since the opening of the class, except when
working “overtime.”[48]
The act of cleaning and furnishing a classroom is evidence
of the men’s desire to learn English and to become American, and of their moral
uprightness as well (they are tired because they are working overtime to clean
troop trains).
Stories of immigrants coming to understand the value of
cleanliness and tidiness served to demonstrate their transformation into
Americans. Dirt and disorder were marks of foreignness, of otherness. Seeds’
own cleanliness, her white clothes, established her own moral superiority. For
example, here is her description of a Mexican family living in a boxcar:
One summer I decided I’d go and teach the Mexican women some
English. They mixed their foodstuff on the floor in the boxcar. Their hair was
hanging down so it almost touched the floor, and I could see the bedbugs
walking across the floor and their hair full of nits. I never got any nits or
bedbugs, but my mother met me every afternoon in the hall at five o’clock with
sulfur that she made me walk through. Then she would make me put on all clean
clothes. She said, “That wasn’t what I raised you for.”[49]
The details of this passage—the food on the floor, the
women’s hair almost touching the floor, bedbugs and nits—are not framed as the
result of poverty or tied to the exploitation that forced these people to live
in a box car, but presented on a more personal level in terms of Seeds’ own
bodily experience. They are responses to conditions of poverty, but they also
seem to be experienced as markers of class. She recounts how her mother, who
was the one who washed and ironed Seeds’ white dresses, made her walk through
sulfur and change her clothes after coming home from teaching. But Seeds
doesn’t comment critically on her mother’s actions or her comment “that wasn’t
what I raised you for”; instead, Seeds lets them stand—and perhaps stand in for
her own sense of class and race superiority.
Another theme in Seeds’ description of poor and immigrant
families centres around odour or insects. For Seeds, these, like uncleanness,
seemed to be a mark of difference and foreignness. Here, for example, is a
description of a Japanese community she visited at the request of a home
teacher, Miss Hasagawa, whom Seeds describes as a “high born Japanese.”
That place was simply jammed. The babies, the children, had
flies crawling over their eyelids, and their eyes didn’t blink. After seeing
those children and those Japanese babies in the mother’s sack, who had their
legs this way with the baby in between—oh, that time I went home and bathed.
Usually I never do that after contact with Japanese people, but you see, they
lived in Tropico, this sort of shanty town that was out somewhere between
Glendale and San Fernando.[50]
Here it is insects—this time flies—that cause Seeds to go
“home and bathe.” It is interesting that at the end of this passage she ties
her reaction to their class: “Usually I never do that after contact with
Japanese people.” And Miss Hasagawa, a fascinating figure, is not explained or
mentioned again. There were few Japanese-American teachers in California at
this time; in some places Japanese-American children were sent to segregated
schools. Miss Hasagawa is presented as a home teacher, implying she was hired
by the Los Angeles school district. Where had she been educated? What
circumstances led to her hiring as a home teacher? Seeds was later highly
critical of the Japanese internment during the Second World War; she taught and
supported Japanese and Japanese-American students at UCLA. But she does not
frame this memory in terms of her later experiences; here the dirt, the flies,
the odour, mark poverty, but also foreignness and difference.
Seeds provides a similar description of teaching
African-Americans. She describes how one day an African-American woman asked
her to hold a literacy class in the African-American woman’s home in the Black
community. This story is fascinating in documenting the desire for education and
literacy on the part of adults in the African-American community, and it also
suggests their trust in Seeds herself. Something about Seeds led this woman,
whom Seeds calls “the leader of the Negroes,” to approach Seeds and ask for her
help. But it also reveals Seeds’ own racial attitudes:
“Now, I thought this all over,” [the African- American
woman] said. “Next Wednesday, you come to my house at one o’clock and I will
have the Negroes in this neighborhood assembled.” I didn’t like it very much; I
didn’t really know what was going to happen, but when I got there, there were
about fifty Negroes packed in a very small house. They all wanted to know how
to read and write. The kids were all assembled on the outside raising a lot of
ruckus. I don’t know how I ever did it, except I had a lot of pencils and
paper. It was a mess. She’d baked cakes, and she had lemonade, which didn’t
have any ice in it. So, there, I knew what it was to eat and drink with a group
of people that were not of my race. I must admit I went home and took a bath
afterwards, because it is something for one person to be surrounded in the beginning
like that. I don’t know whether it’s instinct or what it is. Of course, the
odor was terrific in there. However, this women never had any odor herself, nor
did Mattie Lafayette.[51]
In this passage, Seeds seems aware of the problematic nature
of her reaction and seeks to defend it (“I don’t know if it’s instinct or what
it is…”) Once again, she comments on odour, but makes a point of excluding the
woman who had invited her and another African-American woman, Mattie Lafayette,
from this charge. Seeds gives no other evidence of uncleanness in this house;
perhaps the absence of ice in the lemonade is meant to show cultural lack. But
once again, she goes home to bathe, cleansing herself of contact with
difference. After the meeting at the house, Seeds says she continued to hold
literacy classes, but only at the school. Later in her oral history the
interviewer asked her if she ever got over her “first revulsion in contact.” Seeds
replied, “Oh, yes. You see, when I got them up to the school. I mean, when they
weren’t all swarmed together, there was no odor. I’m very susceptible to odors.
Oh yes, then, I just adored them, because I’d like anything that could be
taught.”[52] Seeds may well have adored her students, but it is striking
that in this passage she comments that she could teach “anything,” not
“anyone,” as though a student were an object and not a human being like
herself.
Seeds’ attitude towards her students thus was a mix of physical
unease, compassion, objectification, and cultural stereotyping. Contrast her
depiction of Black men as “clowns” with this description of Mattie Lafayette,
who had “the best-blooded stock in her. She was a queen.”
I grew to be very fond of them. One of them was Mattie
Lafayette, who was then sixty-five years old. She lived in a house which was
made entirely out of, I guess, wooden boxes, with tin cans that she had cut and
made into a roof. She made her living by doing the most beautiful washing and ironing
I have ever seen in my life…When I was making some rounds of the neighborhood I
used to sit and watch her iron the ruffles. She was born a slave and had the
best-blooded stock in her. She was a queen. She walked with this great basket
of clothes on her head and her back wasn’t bent, even at sixty-five.[53]
In this passage, Seeds draws upon cultural images of the
Black woman as noble earth mother. This woman undertakes hard labour, but her
back is not bent, she is “a queen.”[54] Seeds’ rhetorical calling forth
of the noble black granny who “was born a slave” with the bearing of a “queen”
recalls Hortense Spillers’ comment that Black woman are seen through “markers
so loaded with mythical prepossession that there is no easy way for the agents
buried beneath them to come clean.”[55]
Seeds clearly wants to remember her experiences teaching in
the adult evening school as positive. She is the benevolent transmitter of
culture and citizenship. She describes the classroom of the adult evening
school: “We had lovely blackboards and lots of chalk and I used to take their
hands in mine and help to train them.”[56] In this image, she physically
guides them to literacy. This positioning of herself as guiding students to
literacy occurs in another story she tells of an elderly African-American
woman. Seeds is about to leave for New York to study at Teachers College:
“Miss Seeds,” [the African-American woman] said, “Ah knows
you’s going away. You know, I just want to tell you something. Last Sunday I
took out my Bible and,” she said, “do you know, I read.” Then she said, “Ah’s
got the key to the white man’s Bible. I want to thank you.” Wasn’t that
something?[57]
In these stories of her contact with immigrant,
Mexican-American, and African-American students, Seeds presents herself as the
benevolent and powerful teacher, who holds and dispenses cultural knowledge and
is thanked by grateful students. It is Seeds who is in the position of power.
The markers of odour, insects, dirt, of noble slaves and clownish men are all
set out in contrast to the figure of the gracious loving teacher in a white
dress.
If Seeds fails to explore the dynamics of racism and class
privilege, she equally ignores male privilege or her subordinated social place
as a woman. When she speaks of her experiences at the Avenue 21 School, she
does not discuss her subordinate position as a woman working in a
male-dominated world. On the one hand, this may not have been an immediate
issue for her. Although she mentions a male superintendent, Dr. Bettinger, in
passing, she does not present him as having much involvement with her work. The
principal of Avenue 21 was a woman, as were the major figures in the Americanization
movement in Los Angeles. So Seeds may very well have moved within a “female
dominion” in these years at the Avenue 21 School. On the other hand, many of
her students were boys and men and she speaks of the tension between herself as
a woman in authority and the young men who participated in the school’s
programs.
Seeds describes numerous gangs in the neighborhood. The
school hired men, among them male college students, to monitor the school
playground. According to Seeds’ account, some of these young men who were
supposed to maintain control were in fact afraid of the gangs, but, Seeds says,
she wasn’t. “You know,” she says, “some of them [the gang members] had young
brothers in my room, and I think they never would have touched me.” Here she
draws on her relationship with families and her standing as a white woman
teacher to explain her power. She makes a similar point in the following story:
The boys did such awful things. We had a mortuary across the
street and on Halloween they got all the tin cans they could find, borrowed the
hearse and tied them on it. Then a great lot of them pulled the hearse up and
down the street. Somebody played dead inside and they beat the drums and
everything. Mr. Bettinger came out and saw it, and the mortician said to me,
“Miss Seeds, it’s just not decent of them to do that with the hearse.” So, I
ran down the street and caught them and said, “Boys, Mr. so-and-so is upset
because it’s really sort of sacrilege, he believes, to take the hearse out. Won’t
you take it back?” It went back. They said, “Anything to oblige you.”[58]
This presentation of her power over the tough young men is
elaborated in another tale. The gang liked to come into the school and set off
the fire alarm. One night, Seeds says, she stopped them.
I saw the gang assemble, and I thought, “Oh, dear me, now
here it is again, and what’ll I do?” because, oh, they were so much bigger than
I and so tough. They were really tough. While I wasn’t afraid for myself and
knew they wouldn’t touch me, because they had a code that they wouldn’t touch a
woman, I just didn’t know what to do to stop them. Hickey [the gang leader]
came dashing through past the door, hoping I wouldn’t see him. I ran, and he
saw me coming, but as he reached for the bell he slipped and fell. His gang
came by and enjoyed seeing their leader that way. They ran out and told
everybody that Miss Seeds knocked him down.[59]
Here Seeds acknowledges the physical strength of the young
men (“they were so much bigger”) but at the same time reiterates her belief in
her own moral strength. They would not “touch her,” she says, because of their
“code.” How do we understand this claim of a code of male chivalry in the light
of evidence of widespread violence against women at this time? Is Seeds drawing
on race privilege here? She does not indicate the ethnicity of these young men;
they may very well have been native-born whites. More likely, she is calling
upon class privilege and its intersection with gender, her location as woman
teacher, to make this claim. What does this story suggest about the meaning of
Americanization work for young white women like Seeds, who were, after all,
still disenfranchised and living within a patriarchal world?
Conclusion
Corinne Seeds’ narrative suggests a great deal about the way
race, gender, and class were lived in Americanization programs. But while her
account provides a striking account of one woman’s response to cultural and
racial difference, it does not reveal the broader history of the Americanization
movement in Los Angeles. A number of historians have noted that despite the
widespread concern about the crisis caused by immigration and calls for
Americanization programs, a very small percentage of immigrants actually
attended them.[60] A 1920 survey of Americanization programs in Los
Angeles showed that of 3,448 people who entered Americanization programs, only
322 completed them—less than ten per cent.[61] Although Judith Raftery
argues that teachers in Los Angeles “continued to visit immigrant homes, draw
up legal documents, and preach understanding and even limited pluralism well
into the 1930’s,” by the end of the First World War the Americanization
movement faced the growth of a nationwide reactionary, anti-state, and
anti-foreigner sentiment.[62] In 1922 the Better American Federation,
which was associated with the conservative Merchants and Manufacturers
Association, was organized in Los Angeles. The Federation attacked unions,
regulatory commissions, and progressive programs in general, including
Americanization programs.[63] After conservatives won control of the
school board in the 1923 election, Los Angeles began to cut services, including
neighbourhood adult night schools.
With the passage of the restrictive Johnson-Reed act in
1924, conservative administrations sharply cut funding for Americanization
programs throughout the country. After 1924, new groups of immigrants no longer
arrived each year, while those already in the United States increasingly were
left to their own devices. And of course, only five years after the passage of
the Johnson-Reed Act came the great stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of
the Great Depression. But whether there were formal programs to “Americanize”
newcomers or not, the process of American racialization continued its work,
with some groups fading into whiteness, carrying only a kind of culinary
ethnicity, while others more sharply emerged as “non-white,” thus falling into
existing patterns of American racism.
If Corinne Seeds’ narrative does not document this broader
history of Americanization, it does reveal the workings of race and gender as
they were embodied (or remembered) by one white woman teacher. Historians have
tended to take for granted the middle-class status of these white women
reformers. While this was largely true for the generation of women who founded
the settlement house movement and who were members of women’s clubs, the women
teachers in urban public schools in the progressive era who made up the bulk of
Americanization teachers were in most cases only marginally out of the working
class. So their relationship to the diverse populations they taught, both in
public school classrooms and in Americanization programs, was contradictory. As
teachers, they were themselves the subject of direct surveillance and
supervision; as women, they did not have full citizenship until 1920. Like Seeds,
they symbolized the power of the state and native American culture, but their
own actions were circumscribed by their position as teachers in an increasingly
bureaucratic state and their lives as women within patriarchy.
However strong Corinne Seeds’ sympathy for workers and her
desire to build a more progressive society, her body tells a more conflicted
story. As Joy Parr argues, “Daily we learn through our senses; we act through
routines and react by reflexes so practised they seem inborn; our time and
place inscribe our bodies with habits that, in time, elude conscious awareness.
This learning is what makes us most deeply comfortable in ourselves and haunts
us when…our physical and social circumstances change.”[64] Corinne Seeds’
unconscious sense of her own racial and moral superiority lay deeper than
speech, in the very way she experienced the physical world, in her acute sense
of smell and touch, her embodiment in her clean white dress. All of these
sensations provide evidence of the corporeal knowledge that “marks her of her
time,” to paraphrase Joy Parr. Seeds’ narrative shows us how white women
teachers at times could call upon the authority of the position of teacher to
assert themselves; but in a deeper, more embodied sense, how they lived the
power of whiteness.
[1] P.P. Claxton, “Letter of Transmittal,” Education
of the Immigrant, United States Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 51, 1913,
5. For discussions of the education of immigrants in the United States see
David Tyack, The One Best System (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1972); John Higham, Strangers in the Land (New York: Atheneum, 1967);
Albert Shields, Bulletin 51: Evening Schools for Foreigners (Washington,
D.C.: US Office of Education, 1913); United States Bureau of Education, Evening
Schools for Foreigners: Bulletin 18 (Washington D.C.: U.S. Office of
Education, 1916); United States Immigration Commission, The Children of
Immigrants (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Office of Education, 1911); United
States Bureau of Education Education of the Immigrant: Bulletin 13
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Office of Education, 1913).
[2] Toni Morrison, Dancing in the Dark
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
[3] As Cathy James points out in her work on the
settlement house movement in Toronto, the dynamics of race and class shaped the
responses to the new immigrants there in much the same way as in the
better-known settlements in Chicago and New York. Cathy James, “Reforming
Reform: Toronto’s Settlement House Movement, 1900-1920,” Canadian Historical
Review 82, 1 (Mar. 2001): 55-90. See also Ken Osborne, “Public Schooling and
Citizenship Education in Canada,” Canadian Ethnic Studies/études Ethniques au
Canada XXXII 1 (2000): 8-37.
[4] See Helen Harper, “White Women Teaching in the
North: Problematic Identity on the Shores of Hudson Bay,” in Dismantling
White Privilege: Pedagogy, Politics and Whiteness, ed. N. Rodriguez and L.
Villiaverde (New York: Peter Lang, 2000) for a contemporary discussion of this
dynamic.
[5] See, for example, Robyn Muncy, Creating a
Female Dominion in American Reform (New York: Oxford University Press,
1991); Karen Blair, Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined (New
York: Holmes and Meier Press, 1980); Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue
(New York: Oxford, 1990); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). For California, see Gayle Gullet, Becoming
Citizens (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
[6] Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American
Reform.
[7] John McClymer, “Gender and the ‘American Way of
Life’: Women in the Americanization Movement,” Journal of American Ethnic
History (Spring, 1991): 6.
[8] Ann Marie Woo-Sam, “Domesticating the Immigrant:
California’s Commission on Immigration and Housing and the Domestic Immigration
Movement, 1910-1945” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1999).
[9] Both Bessie Stoddard, member of the Los Angeles
School Board, and Amanda Matthews Chase, the first home teacher in Los Angeles,
for example, had been associated with College Settlement, the most important
Los Angeles settlement house. College Settlement, founded in 1904, had been
modeled on Hull House. By 1911, there were six settlement houses in the foreign
district in Los Angeles, and most of the settlement house workers were women.
Judith Raftery, Land of Fair Promise: Politics and Reform in Los Angeles
Schools, 1885-1941 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 19.
[10] Michael Olnek suggests that what is most
interesting in the Americanization movement is not the obvious message of
patriotism and conformity, but the “symbolic delegitimation of collective
ethnic identity.” Michael Olnek, “Americanization and the Education of
Immigrants, 1900-1925: An Analysis of Symbolic Action,” American Journal of
Education (Aug. 1989): 401.
[11] McClymer, “Gender and the ‘American Way of
Life’,” 8.
[12] Maxine Seller, “The Education of the Immigrant
Woman: 1900-1935,” Journal of Urban History IV (1978): 307-30; Katrina
Irving, Immigrant Mothers: Narratives of Race and Maternity 1890-1925
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
[13] Gayle Gullett, “Women Progressives and the
Politics of Americanization in California, 1915-1920,” Pacific Historical
Review 64 (1995): 88.
[14] Cited in Tyack, The One Best System, 236.
[15] George Sanchez, “Go After the Women:
Americanization and the Mexican Immigrant Woman, 1915-1929.” in Unequal
Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, ed. Vicki Ruiz and
Ellen DuBois (New York: Routledge, 1994), 289.
[16] Ruby Baughman, Elementary Adult Education,
First Annual Report, Department of Immigration Education and Elementary Evening
Schools, Los Angeles School District Publication No. 27, 1919, 40.
[17] Sanchez, “Go After the Women,” 289.
[18] Gullet, “Women Progressives,” 73.
[19] John McClymer summarizes the gendered
contradictions of the Americanization movement, in which disenfranchised
native-born White women instructed immigrant men about the duties of
citizenship and immigrant women on the sanctity of the home: “[The
Americanization teacher] indoctrinated immigrant men in the proper exercise of
civic responsibilities which she did not share. Meanwhile, as the teacher, she
asserted a direct authority over those same men even as she taught them that
public life in the United States was for men only. She also explained the
proper way to run a home to immigrant women even as she actively pursued a
career outside the home herself. She emphasized the primacy of motherhood and
maternal duties even as her presence away from her own home demonstrated that
some women could assume other responsibilities.” McClymer, “Gender and the
‘American Way of Life’,” 15.
[20] Joy Parr, “Notes for a More Sensuous History of
Twentieth-Century Canada: The Timely, the Tacit, and the Material Body,” Canadian
Historical Review 82, 4 (Dec. 2001): 733.
[21] Robert Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis
1850-1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 123.
[22] Raftery, Land of Fair Promise, 67.
[23] Lawrence DeGraff, “The City of Black Angels:
Emergence of the Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890-1930,” Pacific Historical Review
39 (1970): 343.
[24] Raftery, Land of Fair Promise, 13.
[25] The Mexican colonia on Utah Street, in the
center of the city just east of the Los Angeles River, was described by a
contemporary observer: “The land in that locality was divided into tiny lots
which were rented for one or two dollars a month. On each of these lots was
built a shack of hammered-out cans, old boxes, or burlap, with no yard space
nor sanitary appliances of any sort. The toilets were of earth, and were used
in common.” Others lived in “house courts,” rows of two-room apartments
arranged around a courtyard with piped-in water and shared toilets. George
Monroy, Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great
Depression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 20-23.
[26] Corinne Seeds, UES: The History of the
Creative Elementary School (Los Angeles: Oral History Project, University
of California Los Angeles, 1963), 6.
[27] Ibid., 15.
[28] Directory of the Los Angeles City Elementary and
High School Districts, 1919-1920.
[29] The first night school for foreigners seems to
have been established in 1906 at the Castelar School. Baughman, Elementary
Adult Education, 5.
[30] Raftery, Land of Fair Promise, 76.
[31] Monroy, Rebirth, 139.
[32] As cited by Gullet, “Women Progressives,” 83.
[33] John Mahoney, Training Teachers for
Americanization (United States Bureau of Education Bulletin No. 12, 1920),
14.
[34] Baughman, Elementary Adult Education, 34.
[35] Ibid., 36.
[36] Linda Gordon, “Family, Violence, Feminism, and
Social Control,” in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 195.
[37] Raftery, Land of Fair Promise, 3.
[38] Baughman, Elementary Adult Education, 38.
[39] Seeds, Creative Elementary School, 18.
[40] Ibid., 21.
[41] Ibid., 31.
[42] Ibid., 32.
[43] Ibid., 27.
[44] Raftery, Land of Fair Promise, 40.
[45] Monroy, Rebirth, 197.
[46] McClymer, “Gender and the ‘American Way of
Life’,” 11.
[47] Baughman, Elementary Adult Education, 44.
[48] Ibid., 9.
[49] Seeds, Creative Elementary School, 28.
[50] Ibid., 35.
[51] Ibid., 29.
[52] Ibid., 34.
[53] Ibid., 31.
[54] While it is true that there were African
monarchies and that the tradition of African royalty continued to exist in
African-American memory, it is unlikely that Seeds was suggesting this
historical continuity here.
[55] Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe:
An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics (Summer 1987): 65.
[56] Seeds, Creative Elementary School, 31.
[57] Ibid., 36.
[58] Ibid., 21.
[59] Ibid., 26.
[60] Seller, “The Education of the Immigrant Woman,”
307-30.
[61] Gullett, “Women Progressives,” 90.
[62] Raftery, Land of Fair Promise, 198.
[63] Ibid., 104.
[64] Parr, “Notes for a More Sensuous History,” 720.
Boxes regarding Corinne A. Seeds at Young Library, Special collections:
Box 1
History of Miss Seeds, “Box I.”
Box 2
History of University Elementary School during Miss Seeds' administration. 1925-1957, “Box II.”
Box 3
Family School Alliance Scrapbook. 1917-1957.
Box 4
Summer Demonstration School. 1939. Daily record of
The Westwood Movement, 5th Grade, Nora Heflin, teacher.
Box 5
Summer Demonstration School. 1940. Daily record of
The Study of Trains, 4th Grade, Mildred Frazee, teacher.
Box 6
Study of
The Inca People, 6th Grade, Gertrude Maloney, supervising teacher. Spring 1942.
Box 7
Units-of-work. Social Studies Sequences, Kindergarten through 6th Grade. “Box IV.”
Box 8
Teacher-prepared information relating to the Units-of-Work.
Box 9
“Harbor box”: a unit of study as part of transportation in the community, Grade 1.
Box 10
“Westward Movement Box”: a 5th Grade unit of work.
Box 11
Publication and studies related to Miss Seed's program (doctoral and master's theses) “Box V.”
Box 12
Publications and studies related to Miss Seeds' program, “Box V.”
Box 13
Outdoor education. Diana Anderson, PhysdicalEducation Suervisor. 1952-1955.
Box 14
Outdoor education. Diane Anderson. 1956-1958.
Box 15
Photographs of School program.
Boxes 16-17
Photograph albums.