What got you interested in the Wisconsin Central High School Strike of 1927?
I stumbled across the strike while scanning through issues of the Superior Telegram on microfilm as part of my dissertation research. It was fascinating to watch coverage of the event play out – what started as a small news brief become a series of front-page stories. When coverage hit the first full week of daily articles – and then the second, and then the third – I knew I had found an important community episode for studying some of the larger themes in my dissertation.
What made this strike so interesting was how clearly it reflected larger concerns about public education in the 1920s. As I note in the article, public schools carried an important symbolic meaning for communities – they represented modern aspirations and signaled a concrete investment in the future. The newspaper rhetoric around this strike focused on the very nature of public schooling and who was allowed to participate in conversations about the curriculum, which I found fascinating. Luckily, I also had access to student newspapers and materials – without that element, this project wouldn’t have been possible.
How did student coverage of the strike differ from mainstream coverage?
While initially supportive of the students, mainstream coverage quickly began to critique the student strike and question their motivations. Articles in the only daily newspaper in the city used increasingly dismissive language to describe the students, which threatened to erode community support and delegitimize their actions.
Students largely used their print media outlets to challenge the narratives presented in mainstream media. They did this in their official student newspaper (a weekly publication) and then in a later special strike newspaper. The students wanted to present themselves as united, well-informed, and mature in their actions. They saw their protest as a natural extension of the lessons learned in their civics and government classes, and evident of their engagement in community matters. They also saw their voices as incredibly important – they were the ones impacted by a curriculum change, after all – and the attempt to silence their voices as indicative of a group of power-hungry adults not interested in the concerns of the community.
Were there common issues among strikers at various schools, and how did they differ?
The case of Superior was one of a few strikes related to curriculum issues – students walked out on classes over the firing of a biology teacher who taught a health class that was described as being more frank than necessary. Other strikes were related to administration changes – the firing of a principal in another city in Wisconsin, for example, led to a student strike and then a fist fight at a school board meeting.
There were a lot of short-lived strikes over athletics. Some schools threatened to ban athletics to punish students for their behavior at games and matches, and then the students went on strike. Some schools fired coaches, which upset groups of students, who then went on strike. In terms of strikes that garnered national coverage, nothing I’ve found so far has come close to the strike at Superior Central High School.
How do you understand community journalism and how was it influenced during this research?
I view community newspapers as cultural products. They can provide a window into community life at a certain point in time, and play an important role in both the civic life and cultural life of a community. I view coverage of politics as important as coverage of the more mundane elements – birth announcements, special graduation editions, lists of social events and recaps of various association meetings.
But I think it’s also important to keep in mind that newspapers are the result of a process and the work of individuals, who bring their own biases into the newsroom and their own conception of what “counts” as news and who “counts” as a reader. Just as you can learn a lot about a community by reading what’s printed in the paper and thinking about the audience, you also need to pay attention to what (and who) is being left out. One of the exciting things about this project was the opportunity look at how a group left out of coverage tried to leverage their own print products to shape public discourse.
What were the challenges of using student newspapers as source material?
Scholars have typically paid rather little attention to student newspapers, as they can be really frustrating pieces to analyze. Many of these papers operated as a piece of propaganda, of sorts, for the public schools. Administrators recognized that these could be powerful tools for showcasing the value public schools offered a community and consequently exerted a lot of control over what was published. In many cases, students were presenting news coverage of the school that had an official stamp of approval and likely shied away from covering anything controversial or anything that would reflect negatively on the school.
Another issue is related to the social structure of the high school. Many of the students on student newspaper staffs were well connected, socially active, and popular. What they covered reflected their own experiences or the experiences of their friends, and they often used the pages of newspapers to chastise their fellow students for behavior that didn’t meet their standards. The fixation on “pep,” for instance, in the 1920s, reflects this really narrow view of how a high school student should behave (school-oriented, involved in activities, courteous and polite). But none of this is to say that these aren’t useful pieces to analyze, especially when taken in context. These are fascinating products and one of the few was to resurrect student voices from the past.
What was your biggest takeaway?
What further avenues of exploration have you identified as a result of your research?
We can’t view print products in isolation. People have consumed, and continue to consume, multiple media products. To really understand the role mass media plays within a community, you need to look beyond a place’s major newspaper. Schools are fascinating institutions to study, and there’s a lot left unexplored related to schools, the position they occupy within a community, and the politicization of education (not a recent phenomenon!). Less grand, but I heard in passing that there was a community theater production in Superior about the high school student strike. I’d love to see it one day!
Interviewed by Joel Moroney