In the decade and a half after the Civil War, the American public school rose and fell as a central issue in national and state politics. After a relative calm on matters of education during and immediately after the War, the Republican Party and Catholic Church leaders in the late 1860s and early 1870s joined a bitter battle of words over the future of public education—who should control it, how should it be financed, and what should it teach about religion. These battles often reflected very different world views. Leading Protestant ministers and Republican politicians waved the threat of a rising antidemocratic “Catholic menace” as the new bloody shirt and championed their own educational ideal as a remedy—religiously neutral, ethnically and racially inclusive common schools. While Democrats tended to downplay school issues, Catholic Church leaders countered with their own screed: common schools were hardly common, embodying either inherently Protestant notions of religion or the atheism of no true religious creed at all. New York City became the epicenter of these cataclysmic debates, and the brilliant cartoonist Thomas Nast immortalized the Radical Republican side of the issue in the pages of Harper's Weekly.

In the early twentieth century, many American educators pinned their hopes for a revitalized nation on the character education of “youth,” especially adolescent boys. Although the emphasis on student morality was far from novel—nineteenth-century common and secondary schools operated as bastions of Protestant republican virtue—new perceptions of moral decay, institutional failure, and general cultural anomie prompted a marked increase in urgency. Among the many agencies confronting this impending moral crisis, the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) had perhaps the most comprehensive program of regeneration for American youth, encompassing a carefully articulated system extending from boyhood to collegiate and employed young men. Despite this expansive role, historians have produced only cursory glimpses of this organization, neglecting in particular the YMCA's work in developing an extracurricular program of moral education in public high schools.