Suburban public schools have become the predominant form of American education in the past fifty years. As a number of commentators have noted, however, historians have devoted relatively little attention to the development of these educational systems. This is surprising, given the importance of schools in the development of many suburban communities, especially during the postwar era. Education became a critical element in suburban struggles to create distinctive local identities in the wake of metropolitan development and liberal reform. Neighborhood schools were sites of political conflict over these issues in Southern California and elsewhere, as suburbanites asserted their independence as property owners. Recent studies have documented how this contributed to a widespread “tax revolt” during the latter 1970s, and a sharp conservative turn in politics that accompanied it. Little has been written, however, about how the rise of such “localism” in suburban political culture affected the schools.

With the regularity of commencement, colleges and universities today conduct annual solicitations of alumni and multiyear comprehensive fundraising campaigns. These now commonplace practices constituted radical innovations in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The former originated at Yale University in 1890; the latter at Harvard University between 1915 and 1925. It was through these two innovations that higher education began to assimilate the new phenomenon of “mass giving” and “people's philanthropy” which arose in American society between 1890 and 1920.

A few days before Thanksgiving in 1908, the home economist Mabel Hyde Kittredge initiated a school lunch program at an elementary school in Hell's Kitchen, serving soup and bread to hungry children in the infamous Manhattan neighborhood. The following year, she founded the School Lunch Committee (SLC), a voluntary organization composed of home economists, educators, physicians, and philanthropists dedicated to improving the nutritional health and educational prospects of schoolchildren. By 1915, just seven years after the initiative began, the SLC was serving 80,000 free or low-price lunches a year to children at nearly a quarter of the elementary schools in Manhattan and the Bronx. Most of the schools were located in the city's poorest districts, and experience showed that the lunches were reaching those most in need at minimal cost to the organization. All the food served was inspected by the Health Department, and the meals were nutritionally balanced and tailored to the ethnic tastes and religious requirements of different school populations. Sparse but compelling evidence indicated that the program had reduced malnourishment among the children who partook, and teachers and principals at participating schools reported reductions in behavioral problems, dyspepsia, inattentiveness, and lethargy.

On the evening of May 17, 1946, more than 1,200 festive supporters streamed into the Brooklyn Academy of Music to honor a New York City teacher who had survived, by the skin of her teeth, charges of “un-American” teaching. Since 1935, New York City's public school teachers faced the threat of investigation and dismissal for potentially subversive radical political beliefs or affiliations. Tonight, however, the audience breathed a collective sigh of relief that the Board of Education hearing had turned out well and that the teacher in question would retain her position.