Abstract

""Making Our Youth Safe for Democracy": Junior Achievement and the Future of American Enterprise, 1916-1945"

Maxwell Greenberg, University of Wisconsin, Madison (maxwell.greenberg@wisc.edu)

In 1920, writing in the Journal of Education, Theodore N. Vail admonished readers to take seriously what he saw as the most crucial goal for education: to “make democracy safe for the world.” His anxiety was palpable. Though he celebrated the achievements of industry that had ushered in economic abundance, he recognized its fragility. He waxed prophetic, claiming the United States would soon find itself strained during a time of “want.” To avoid what he saw as the inevitable ebb and flow of national prosperity and poverty, “the growing generation” needed to be taught “thrift and economy” rather than aspire to the “self-indulgence” of unproductive recreation. The culmination of his educational preoccupations was Junior Achievement (1919), an extracurricular program that aimed to assiduously cultivate the political–economic ideology of American youth.
Junior Achievement’s founding complicates earlier scholarship on the rise of the conservative movement. It provides further nuance for historicizing the political economy in which private enterprise became a tool to resolve broad social issues. Many historians of education have argued that progressive era schooling was already a useful institution for creating subordinate workers. Why then, in a moment of unprecedented wealth creation, did the founders of Junior Achievement identify the urgent need for such a program? Why was a program that existed outside the school system necessary?
The project, it seems, was primarily ideological. Rather than a clear specter haunting American labor relations (any viable Socialist politics collapsed in the wake of WWI), Vail and his co-founders were largely concerned about the way in which educational programming was organized. Junior Achievement provided an alternative to state-sponsored, compulsory education. After the Great Merger Movement, when the “politics of pay” had come to dominate political-labor relations, Junior Achievement offered a practical – and voluntary – introduction to a new corporate hierarchy.