Why America's first Department of Education didn't last

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America has done this before - creating, then decapitating a federal department of education. It was right after the Civil War, it wasn't pretty, and the toxic debate surrounding it sounds familiar today.

The brief experiment born in 1867 and enacted by Southern Democrat President Andrew Johnson was fueled by two interests - scholarly ambition to sculpt American schools into world-class institutions, and abolitionists' fervor for equality.

It was fraught with conflict over scope, budget, mission and staffing. The word "Yankee" was used in much of the debate, and not kindly.

"The President and Congress have quite enough to do without undertaking to run the schools," sniffed a skeptical 1866 editorial in the Council Grove Democrat, a newspaper in Morris County, Kansas.

But ultimately, the postwar attempt to expand and manage education for all Americans was also doomed by the everlasting culture war that the United States can't shake. Today we'd call it a red state/blue state conflict.

A newly reunited nation was bound to be lopsided and needed "to enforce education without regard to color," Radical Republican Rep. Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota said when he introduced the idea of a Department of Education in 1866 to the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, according to "The Life of Henry Barnard."

This idea had been circulating in educational circles for some time as Horace Mann and Henry Barnard, two influential thinkers on the early shaping of schools in America, had been leading a national conversation on the idea of federal involvement. Education at the time was entirely in the hands of states thanks to the 10th Amendment, which delineated federal and states' rights.

The preamble to Donnelly's resolution, which passed the House by a large majority, said an education department was needed because "republican interests can find permanent safety only upon the basis of the universal intelligence of the people," and because "the great disasters which have afflicted the Nation and desolated one-half its territory are traceable, in a great degree, to the absence of common schools and general education among the people of the lately rebellious States."

Donnelly argued that making education accessible and standardized in America is a way "to make every man who votes an intelligent, conscious, reasoning, reflecting being."

Those who weren't considered part of the Northern abolitionist elites dismissed it as poppycock, Yankee meddling and another federal power grab that was characteristic of Reconstruction.

"The schoolhouses of the country will go under the control of the General Government," that editorial in the Council Grove Democrat said. "Churches, I suppose, are to follow next."

There was a deep mistrust of "Yankee school books" and "Yankee schoolmarms" noted in an 1867 editorial in the Augusta Chronicle.

"No branch of literature," it said, "should receive a more careful scrutiny from our people than the elementary books which are first placed in the hands of our children."

It warned that "Southern parents should be watchful, lest the minds of our youth receive false and demoralizing impressions from the teachings of the Puritanical South-haters, who manufacture books with the view of corrupting public sentiment, by instilling their peculiar dogmas through the medium of the schoolroom."

Amid the national debate, Rep. James Garfield (R-Ohio) - a former Union general and future president - introduced legislation to create the department.

Garfield was deeply interested in education; it was what lifted him out of poverty. And he was a teacher and principal of Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, which was chartered as Hiram College in 1867.

But it was the pervasive inequity of education in the South that drove him to demand a mission to educate America as part of Reconstruction. It became clear 15 years later, during his inaugural address, how heavily that weighed on him:

"For the North and South alike there is but one remedy. All the constitutional power of the nation and of the States and all the volunteer forces of the people should be surrendered to meet this danger by the savory influence of universal education," he said to a massive crowd at the Capitol's East Portico on March 4, 1881.

The quest for that remedy began as the modest bill that Garfield introduced in 1866, proposing a department with just four employees and a budget of $4,000 (about $85,000 today).

Here's what it was supposed to do: "for the purpose of collecting such statistics and facts as shall show the condition and progress of education in the several States and Territories, and of diffusing such information respecting the organization and management of schools and school systems and methods of teaching as shall aid the people of the United States in the establishment and maintenance of efficient school systems, and otherwise promote the cause of education throughout the country."

Part of that mission involved tracking the progress of the Freedman's Bureau, created by Congress in 1865 to provide housing, food, medical aid, legal assistance and to establish schools for the millions of people emancipated from slavery. The schools were a condition for the Confederate States' admission to the union.

Barnard became the first commissioner and presented a mountain of studies, data and findings, including a 786-page roundup of technical instruction around the world after his first year.

He wanted to visit states where no public schools existed, continue his investigations, hire another clerk to help with the workload and some money to pay his travel and publication expenses, which he had been paying out of his own pocket, according to his biography.

"The report, submitted on June 2, met with no favorable reception," his biography says.

The lack of interest of Congress in his findings was underscored with a demotion, "abolishing the Department of Education and creating in its place an Office of Education, attached to the Department of the Interior, and reducing Barnard's salary to $3,000 a year."

Barnard quit in 1870.

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