The turn of the twentieth century would not seem to offer a prime period in which to evaluate the effects of literacy on a major social institution like religion, for vast segments of the population of the United States were already literate, and school enrollments had long been high, particularly on the primary level, in rural areas, and in the northern states (Fishlow, 1966; Kaestle and Vinovskis, 1980; Soltow and Stevens, 1977). Yet, illiteracy had taken on the status of a social problem only when urbanization, industrialization, and population diversity coincidentally threatened traditional American culture and its presumably common bases. At that point, the organization of schooling on a wide scale was recommended to policy makers as a recourse by which social control could be reimposed (Graff, 1979: 22–23). Whereas previously education had been a popular movement (cf. Meyer et al., 1979), it now had become a bureaucratic imperative. Indeed, sweeping terms have been called upon to describe the subject of literacy in America in the latter two-thirds of the nineteenth century: