1. Kilpatrick, William K., Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong: Moral Illiteracy and the Case for Character Education (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992)Google Scholar; Bennett, William J., The Book of Virtues: A Treasury ofGreat Moral Stories (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993)Google Scholar; Himmelfarb, Gertrude, The De-Moralization of Society: Front Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995)Google Scholar; Kann, Mark E., “Character Education for Democratic Citizenship,” Moral Education Forum 18 (Summer 1993): 128-37Google Scholar; Lickona, Thomas, “The Return of Character Education,” Educational Leadership 51 (November 1993): 6–11 Google Scholar; Rosenblatt, Roger, “Teaching Johnny to Be Good,” New York Times Magazine, April 30, 1995, 36–41, 50, 60, 64, 74.Google Scholar

2. Hauerwas, Stanley, Vision and Virtue: Essays in Christian Ethical Reflection (Notre Dame, Ind.: Fides Publishers, Inc., 1974)Google Scholar; Character and the Christian Life: A Study in Theological Ethics (San Antonio, Tex.: Trinity University Press, 1975); A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).

3. Most histories that deal with character or the development of American morality stop around 1918. See Boyer, Paul, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; and Danbohm, David B., “The World of Hope”: Progressives and the Struggle for an Ethical Public Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987).Google Scholar There are a few exceptions. Two religious education dissertations took up the topic in a limited way, and one historian of secular education wrote a brief survey (just over 100 pages) covering the years 1607 to the present: William Edwin Chapman, “Character Education in the Twenties” (Th.D. diss., Princeton Theological Seminary, 1969); Nam Soon Song, “Character Education in Protestantism: A Theological and Educational Reconsideration” (Ed.D. diss., Presbyterian School of Christian Education [Richmond, Virginia], 1987); McClellan, B. Edward, Schools and the Shaping of Character: Moral Education in America, 1607-Present (Bloomington: ERIC Clearinghouse for Social Studies/Social Science Education and the Social Studies Development Center, Indiana University, 1992).Google Scholar

4. For treatment of the professionalization of Protestant religious education, see Schmidt, Steven A., A History of the Religious Education Association (Birmingham, Ala.: Religious Education Press, 1983), 48, 56–105.Google Scholar

5. See Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, Character: Report of the Committee on Character Education of the National Education Association, Bulletin, 1926, no. 7 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1926), 23-27.

6. Division of Research and Experimentation in Elementary Education, Norfolk, Virginia, Character Education in Norfolk Elementary Schools, Bulletin no. 1 (Norfolk City School Board, 1928), 51.

7. Hartshorne, Hugh, Character in Human Relations (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932), 32.Google Scholar

8. See Hoben, Allan, The Church School of Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1918), 57, 66Google Scholar; Hartshorne, , Character in Human Relations, 34–35 Google Scholar; Department of the Interior, Character, 33.

9. Department of the Interior, Character.

10. Artman, J. M. and Jacobs, J. A., “The Significance of Present Trends in the Character Education Movement,” Religious Education 23, no. 3 (March 1928): 240.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. See Artman and Jacobs, “The Significance of Present Trends,” 243; Maller, Julius B., “Needed Investigation in Jewish Education,” Jewish Education 1, no. 2 (May 1929): 99 Google Scholar; “Character and Intelligence,” Jewish Education 3, no. 1 (January-March 1931): 2; and Chapman, “Character Education in the Twenties,” 128.

12. See Fass, Paula, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Leahey, Thomas H., A History of Modern Psychology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1991), 243-45Google Scholar; and Danbohm, David B., “The World of Hope”, 184-85.Google Scholar

13. Hartshorne, , Character in Human Relations, 25.Google Scholar

14. See Hoben, , Church School of Citizenship, 2, 17 Google Scholar; Hartshorne, , Character in Human Relations, 25–26 Google Scholar; Chapman, “Character Education in the Twenties,” 12; and Handy, Robert T., “The American Religious Depression,” Church History 29 (March 1960): 3–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. Hoben, Church School of Citizenship, 5-7; and Hartshorne, Hugh, Childhood and Character: An Introduction to the Study of the Religious Life of Children (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1919), 160, 229-31.Google Scholar

16. Hartshorne, , Childhood and Character, 230 Google Scholar; Athearn, Walter Scott, Character Building in a Democracy (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924), 17.Google Scholar

17. See Rogers, Daniel T., “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 113-32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. See Cremin, Lawrence A., The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), viii-ix.Google Scholar

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21. Among them was Horace Kallen, who first articulated his idea of pluralism in a speech he made to the Intercollegiate Menorah Association in 1913, more fully presented in The Structure of Lasting Peace (Boston: Marshall Jones Co., 1918) and Culture and Democracy in the United States: Studies in the Group Psychology of the American Peoples (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924); others included Hapgood, Norman, “The Future of the Jews in America,” Harper's Weekly 61 (November 27, 1915): 511-12Google Scholar; and Bourne, Randolph, “The Jew and Trans-National America,” Menorah Journal 2 (December 1916): 280.Google Scholar See also Higham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925, 2d ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 304 Google Scholar; and Higham, John, Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America, rev. ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 214.Google Scholar

22. Niebuhr, Reinhold, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932), ix, xi-xxiv.Google Scholar

23. See Seymour, Jack L., From Sunday School to Church School: Continuities in Protestant Church Education in the United States, 1860-1929 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1982), 36–38.Google Scholar

24. Humphrey, Z. M., “The National Importance of the Mission Sunday School,” The Sunday School Teacher 1 (June 1866): 162 Google Scholar, quoted in Seymour, , From Sunday School to Church School, 39.Google Scholar

25. Coe, George A., A Social Theory of Religious Education (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1917), 54–55.Google Scholar

26. Ibid., 28-29, 101-2; Seymour, , From Sunday School to Church School, 143.Google Scholar

27. See Schmidt, , A History of the Religious Education Association, 11–14, 23-36, 69-76, 84-87Google Scholar; Hutchison, William, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 155-64, 274-82Google Scholar; and Kendig Brubaker Cully, “A Later Look at Harrison Sacket Elliott,” in Pioneers of Religious Education in the 20th Century: A Festschrift for Herman E. Wornom, ed. Boardman W. Kathan, a Special issue of Religious Education 73 (September-October 1978): 57-66.

28. Department of the Interior, Character, 2 (emphasis in original); Thorndike, E. L., “Measurement in Education,” Teachers College Record 22 (November 1921), 371-79.Google Scholar

29. See Danbohm, , “The World of Hope”, 119-20Google Scholar; and Joncich, Geraldine, The Sane Positivist: A Biography of Edward L. Thorndike (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), 308.Google Scholar

30. Quoted in Danbohm, , “The World of Hope”, 120-21Google Scholar; Cubberley, Ellwood P., Public Education in the United States (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), 378-79.Google Scholar

31. See Peirce, Charles Sanders, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Popular Science Monthly 12 (January 1878): 286 Google Scholar; see also Hollinger, David A., “The Problem of Pragmatism in American History,” chap. 2 in In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 32.Google Scholar

32. Hollinger, “The Problem of Pragmatism in American History,” 24.

33. James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902 (New York: The New American Library, 1958), 338-39.Google Scholar

34. See Joncich, , The Sane Positivist, 347.Google Scholar

35. Coe, George Albert, “What Is Pragmatism?” The Methodist Quarterly Review 57 (April 1908): 211-19, quotes on 218 and 214.Google Scholar

36. Ibid., 217, 214.

37. James, , Varieties of Religious Experience, 34.Google Scholar

38. Hartshorne, Hugh, May, Mark A., and Shuttleworth, Frank K., Studies in the Nature of Character (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1930), 371.Google Scholar

39. Bower, William Clayton, Character through Creative Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), 13.Google Scholar

40. Athearn, , Character Building in a Democracy, 103-4, 108, 123 (emphasis in original).Google Scholar

41. Cited in Leahey, , History of Modern Psychology, 199 Google Scholar (emphasis in original); see also Joncich, , The Sane Positivist, 423.Google Scholar

42. Cited in Leahey, , History of Modern Psychology, 201.Google Scholar

43. Department of the Interior, Character, 13-14; Bower, , Character through Creative Experience, 50 Google Scholar; Athearn, , Character Building in a Democracy, 38-39 Google Scholar, 124 (emphasis in original).

44. Bower, , Character through Creative Experience, 258, 88.Google Scholar

45. Hartshorne, , Character in Human Relations, 198, 254; see also 241-49.Google Scholar

46. Hartshorne, , Childhood and Character, 173.Google Scholar

47. Bower, Character through Creative Experience, 227 (emphasis in original).

48. Nearly forty years later, Abraham Maslow articulated the naturalistic interpretation unequivocally in Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1964). He wrote: “It has recently begun to appear that these ‘revelations’ or mystical illuminations can be subsumed under the head of the ‘peak-experiences’… or ‘transcendent’ experiences which are now being eagerly investigated by many psychologists. That is to say, it is very likely… that these older reports, phrased in terms of super- natural revelation, were … perfectly natural, human peak-experiences of the kind that can easily be examined today, which, however, were phrased in terms of whatever conceptual, cultural, and linguistic framework the particular seer had available in his time” (19-20).

49. Bower, , Character through Creative Experience, 231.Google Scholar

50. Ibid., 156; Hartshorne, , Character in Human Relations, 254, 275 (emphasis in original).Google Scholar

51. See Athearn, , Character Building in a Democracy, 22, 41, 76, 89Google Scholar; Department of the Interior, Character, 86; Coe, George A., “Some Results of the Organization and Work of the Religion Education Association,” Religious Education 26, no. 1 (January 1931): 2 Google Scholar; Smith, Gerald Birney, “Significance of the Convention Program of the Religious Education Association,” part one, Religious Education 22, no. 4 (April 1927): 295 Google Scholar; and Seymour, , From Sunday School to Church School, 36–38, 40-43, 73, 82, 86, 106, 116.Google Scholar

52. Schmidt, , History of the Religious Education Association, 91.Google Scholar

53. Ibid.

54. See “Twenty-Eighth Annual Convention of The Religious Education Association, Convention Theme: Religious Issues in Our Economic Crisis,” Religious Education 26, no. 2 (February 1931): 194-96; Ellwood, Charles A., “The Philosophy of Protestantism in Its Relation to Industry,” Religious Education 26, nos. 5 and 6 (May-June 1931): 420-26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Israel, Edward L., “The Philosophy of Judaism in Its Relation to Industry,” Religious Education 26, nos. 5 and 6 (May-June 1931): 427-32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Artman, J. M., “The Depression: A Pronouncement by the Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant Groups,” Religious Education 27, no. 2 (February 1932): 99–100 Google Scholar; and “Report of the National Conference of the Religious Education Association—Conference Topic: The Relation of Religious and Moral Education to the Current Economic and Social Situation,” Religious Education 29, no. 3 (June 1934): 195.

55. See Landman, Isaac, “The Present Opportunity and Responsibility of Religious Education: The Jewish View,” Religious Education 28, no. 4 (June 1933): 283-87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blumenfield, Samuel M., “Can Youth Movements Save Us?” Religious Education 31, no. 4 (October 1936): 255-60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yard, James M., “What Happens to Religion and Democracy in a Totalitarian State,” Religious Education 32, no. 1 (January 1937): 13–16 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Annual Meeting of the Religious Education Association—Topic: Education and Authority in Church and State,” Religious Education 32, no. 2 (April 1937): 82-84.

56. See Holifield, E. Brooks, A History of Pastoral Care in America: From Salvation to Self-Realization (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1983), 210–306.Google Scholar

57. For a description of these competing types of morality and the efforts to reconcile them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Danbohm, “The World ofHope”, 15, 78.

58. See, for example, Hudson, Winthrop S. and Corrigan, John, Religion in America: An Historical Account of the Development of American Religious Life, 5th ed. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1992), 258-68Google Scholar; Ahlstrom, Sydney E., A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 763-84Google Scholar; Cauthen, Kenneth, The Impact of American Religious Liberalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 3–37 Google Scholar; and William Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism.

59. They did this in tandem with such contemporary theologians as Shailer Mathews and Henry Nelson Wieman, who were also heavily influenced by pragmatism as well as the naturalistic and social scientific study of religion. Hartshorne explicitly commented on the continuity between his work and Wieman's; see Hartshorne, , Character in Human Relations, 217-18.Google Scholar

60. In addition to William Bennett's best-seller and the work of Thomas Lickona, the subject of character has become of nationwide interest to public school principals. The President of the United States has also contributed to its popularization. See MacAlpine, Ian R., “The Foundations of Character: Teaching Students—and Ourselves—How to Make the Right Decisions,” The High School Magazine: For Principals, Assistant Principals, and All High School Leaders 2, no. 2 (December 1994): 27–33 Google Scholar; and Harris, J. F., “Clinton Mounts Bully Pulpit to Preach on the Nation's Moral Health,” The Washington Post, May 21, 1995, A20.Google Scholar