After the Civil War, many intellectuals believed that illiteracy among Southerners who did not own slaves had allowed them to be swindled by the South’s slaveholding aristocracy. “This ignorance,” one prominent educator said in 1865, “enabled the rebel leaders to create prejudice” and induce uneducated people to support rebellion. Reconstruction presented the country’s educators with an opportunity: They could in one stroke standardize a hodgepodge of different educational structures nationwide, address the illiteracy of white Southerners and educate millions of newly freed slaves.
In December 1865, one Republican congressman introduced a resolution that would create a new government agency to “enforce education without regard to color.” Two years later, the nation’s first Department of Education was created to be an essential component to both emancipating the slaves and educating the minds of those who had fought to keep them slaves. As President Trump and his administration seek to shutter the department, the initial mission of its forerunner — to protect a republican form of government from oligarchy by educating its citizens — presents a clear counterargument to the faulty ideas that a federal education department is a newfangled invention and that it is unnecessary.
In a March executive order aimed at shuttering the Department of Education, Mr. Trump said that it “has existed for less than one fifth of our nation’s history.” By the end of March, his administration had terminated about half the department’s work force. In October, it eliminated even more jobs at the department’s Office for Civil Rights, which was assigned to enforce laws against racial discrimination in federally funded schools and colleges. This month, the administration announced that critical responsibilities overseen by the department were being shifted to different government agencies.
Before the Civil War, most Northern states had established formal public school systems. The South lagged far behind, with most Southern states lacking a well-established system of public schools. White illiteracy in the South was far higher than in the North. The lack of common schools in the South became a scapegoat after the war. If, the logic went, poor whites remained uneducated, they would be vulnerable to the influence of the Southern aristocracy and incapable of self-government. “Wherever the heel of despotism rests upon the neck of humanity,” said Emerson Elbridge White, the Ohio state superintendent, in an 1866 speech, “the ignorance of the oppressed has been urged as the justification of the oppressor.”
Advocates of the Department of Education believed that universal freedom and universal education were intrinsically linked. Like emancipation, education was a national concern that could not be left to the states alone.
Under Article IV of the Constitution, the federal government is obligated to “guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government.” Such a government, they argued, could not exist without a system of free schools to teach students how to be citizens.
A federal educational agency “would be a practical recognition by the government of the value and necessity of universal education as a means of perpetuating free institutions,” as White put it. “Around each child born into American liberty, they must stand as a triple guarantee that the boon of education shall not be denied.”
Racist violence — and the legal frameworks that eventually became the Jim Crow laws — showed that readmitted Southern states could not be trusted to enforce universal freedom. They had already opposed efforts like the Freedmen’s Bureau that had aimed to assist freed slaves. Southern states repeatedly refused to use tax dollars to fund Black education — and regularly used tax money from Black people to prop up whites-only schools. Even privately funded Black schools were often shut down, as when Mississippi whites seized rooms paid for by freed Black people for a schoolhouse and used them for whites-only education instead. When thievery did not close Black schools, arson did.
It took two years of legislative wrangling to pass the bill creating the Department of Education in 1867. In its first year, the department was understaffed, underfunded and crippled by internal squabbling. But in practice, the new department could do little more than take inventory of American academic affairs and produce reports.
Concerns about states’ rights hobbled the agency. To push the Department of Education through Congress, its supporters had allowed it to be weakened, leading detractors to criticize its impotence. Many attacks were more sinister. Fernando Wood, a New York Democrat who had led congressional opposition to the abolition of slavery, attacked the Freedmen’s Bureau and the new Education Department. “The practical operation of that bureau is to support hundreds of thousands of lazy, idle Negroes at the expense of the government,” he said, “and the object of this Department of Education is to educate those Negroes.”
Opponents of the department charged that it was a veiled attempt to centralize control of education. Yet when the department’s supporters stressed that the department would exercise census-style functions, its opponents pivoted, arguing that an agency without the authority to impose reforms was redundant. Less than a year after its creation, a congressional committee circumvented debate in Congress to eliminate it. The department became a smaller office within the Interior Department. It wasn’t until 1979 that a separate department was created again. Jimmy Carter re-established the department, fulfilling a campaign promise made to the country’s largest labor union, the National Education Association. For Republicans, the connection to a major labor union has made the department a target, and many have since sought the agency’s elimination.
Mr. Trump’s plan to defund the Department of Education into oblivion (if he can’t eliminate it by statute) echoes attacks by conservatives after the Civil War. He has joined the fight against federal oversight of education as the latest steward of the Confederacy’s endeavor to preserve oligarchy.
Mr. Trump’s administration seems to be creating the same kind of oligarchy that the original Department of Education was intended to prevent. The administration’s opponents would do well to remember the legacy of the first Department of Education — and how the department came undone. The department was well intended, but sectional politics severely limited its powers.
The original department’s eradication is more than a historical footnote. It’s a warning. Noble institutions without power are mere monuments to good intentions — and eventually, targets for destruction.
Anthony Conwright is a freelance writer based in New York City and is currently working on his first novel, “Speak, Blackness.”
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