Two historians, Clarence J. Karier and Walter Feinberg, recently have suggested that John Dewey's commitment to democracy was less than whole-hearted. This view rests in part on their use of a report submitted by Dewey to the Federal Government in 1918: “Conditions Among the Poles in the United States: Confidential Report.” As Karier puts it, the report reveals Dewey as a conservative who was “committed to flexible, experimentally managed, orderly social change, which included a high degree of manipulation.” A closer look at the report and its historical context, however, suggests precisely the opposite: Dewey is shown as strongly and personally committed to the democratic process and opposed to manipulative government. In addition, it is a revealing example of Dewey's efforts to connect his educational theories to more general social and political questions.