Pennsylvania's statehouse, the journalist surmised, had “never witnessed such a sight.” Neither had he. Gazing across the galleries, he was astounded to find them packed—with women. Women! Women crowding the benches, women standing in doorways, and women “clustered in bunches of color in the narrow little aisles”—all awaiting news of Pennsylvania's “scientific temperance” bill, which faced a final vote that afternoon. The bill would require all state public schools to provide instruction in “the nature and effects of alcoholic drinks and other narcotics.” Additionally, all new teachers would be required to pass an examination in the subject, which would have to be taught “as thoroughly as other required branches”—and schools that failed to comply with the legislation risked the loss of state education funds.

The state constitutional convention of 1879 significantly changed the status of California's land-grant university. Throughout the 1870s, farmers and labor groups accused the university's Board of Regents with mismanagement of federal land grants, corruption, and a failure to establish agriculture, mining, and mechanical arts programs as outlined in the federal Morrill Act and statutory provisions within the state's 1868 Organic Act. During a tumultuous decade in California history, many saw the new University of California as serving the interests of the upper classes, focusing on classical “gentlemanly training” and replicating the Yankee private institutions of the East. The detractors of the university demanded that, as an instrument of social and economic development, the university primarily serve the training and research needs of agriculture and industry, the stated “leading objective” of the institution under statutory law.

Even before the Reichstag defeated the renewal of the law banning the Social Democratic party in January 1890, Emperor William II was ready to discard Bismarck's policy of repression and to use pedagogy as a weapon against socialism. In an order sent to the Prussian State Ministry on 1 May 1889, the king of Prussia and German emperor demanded that the schools make a greater effort to refute socialist theories and to impart to the pupils a “healthy” view of society and the state. He proposed that the instruction of history cover more closely the modern era and especially the social policies of the Hohenzollern dynasty, from the abolition of serfdom to the sickness and old age insurance legislation of the 1880s, “in order to show that the rulers of Prussia have always considered it their duty to improve the living conditions of the laboring classes” and that “in the future workers can expect justice and security only under the protection and care of the king at the head of the state.” The emperor wanted the teachers to describe the menace of revolutionary socialism in such dark colors that the pupils would be “filled with revulsion and fear.”