The contours of urban school reform in the Progressive era have now assumed a familiar form. While the most influential interpretations of the past decade differ somewhat in intent and emphasis, they all emphasize the essential elitism, conservatism, and importance of various school reforms enacted in the early twentieth century. This is true of scholars with a wide range of political interests and ideological concerns. This essay, which is a social analysis of organized labor, socialism, and the Milwaukee schools during the Progressive era, examines the political fortunes of one of the most successful labor movements in American history. Besides constituting a compelling story in its own right, Milwaukee Socialism highlights well the process of Progressive era educational reform; indeed, it reveals the complex historical interactions that produced the distinctive reform coalitions of the age. A study of Milwaukee's socialist labor movement demonstrates how particular working people influenced school reform in a time of rapid social change, and it also demonstrates how they in turn were shaped by the reform groups that helped inaugurate many of the period's innovative educational programs.

Anyone who has discussed the history of childhood with college students will surely have noticed that most of those students have not yet paid close attention to children. The children whom they imagine turn out to be memories of themselves. This is hardly surprising; it is just one more way of saying that it takes a truly mature person to understand a child. Our immaturity is responsible for our projections, and through most of history “childhood” has been a projection—of self-pity, self-righteousness, or self-hate. At times, “the child” has served as a cultural icon for a whole society—an image of perfection or of some power or virtue which adults seem to have lost. And we can expect some devotion to the child's image to persist throughout human history, so long as our most powerful memories refer to that stage of life. There are periods, indeed, which are characterized by a veritable cult of childhood.

In those decades immediately preceding World War I, referred to nostalgically as “La Belle Epoque,” higher education returned to France. The Third Republic restored it to life, although its heartland remained the old Latin Quarter where there now arose in dominion architect Paul Nénot's “University Palace:” a giant rectangular building one hundred yards in breadth and almost three hundred yards long, a concentration of auditoriums, exam rooms, lecture halls, laboratories, offices, libraries and museums that then made of the New Sorbonne the nation's greatest institution of higher learning. A three-fold expansion and reconstruction by the republic of the original structure, its massive grey walls, nevertheless, appeared more hewn to the form of some ancient bastille than to any suitable republican symbol.