Building America

In U. S. classrooms, textbooks are anywhere from one to 20 years behind the times. Gratified were many secondary educators, therefore, when last spring an able pamphlet on Steel, vivid in text and photographs, was rushed to students almost at the hour when U. S. Steel historically signed a labor contract with C. I. O. As President Roosevelt was being elected for a second term and preparing to unlimber his Supreme Court reorganization plan, an equally vivid exposition of Our Constitution and the Court was appropriately made available. Both pamphlets were issues of Building America, "a photographic magazine of modern problems," pioneer publication in a trend toward placing the fresh stuff of life in the schools for study. This relatively little known magazine last week produced its 19th issue. The topic, as timely as the agriculture bills now under debate in House and Senate: Our Farmers.

Building America is published by the Society for Curriculum Study, whose 900 members include some of the nation's top-rank educators. It is partly supported by the Lincoln School of Columbia's Teachers College, until this year had a staff of WPA researchers. Claiming to be impartial, scientific, it presents the problems of modern civilization to junior and senior high-school children. Its creed: "The American people have so far mastered the forces of nature that, for the first time in history, we can now live in an age of plenty for all." It publishes eight issues a year, each dealing with a particular problem. Issues to date have included Housing, Food, Men & Machines, Power, Youth Faces the World, Social Security, We Consumers, Movies, News. Next month Building America will show the Labor problem.

Our Farmers briefly relates the history of farming in the U. S., describes modern farming methods, tells how Tip Estes, a typical Indiana farmer, and his family work and live; discusses the income of rich and poor farmers, tenants, sharecroppers and laborers; sums up what the Government would or could do for farmers. What makes Building America unique is the extraordinary illustrations that tell the story so well that they need little explanatory text. Notably communicative photographs in Our Farmers include a grimy farmer drinking water from a tin cup beside his tractor, Tip Estes' family of eight sitting down to dinner, three farmers talking things over in the general store, a group of striking farmers fleeing from tear gas, the fingers of erosion tearing away the soil.

The facts on which Building America is based come from authoritative treatises and periodicals like FORTUNE. Each issue is submitted to experts on both sides of controversial questions before publication. Although every issue asks U. S. schoolchildren to think about how better use can be made of the nation's resources. Building America has thus far escaped serious attack. Scripps-Howard's New York World-Telegram denounced the Power issue as propaganda for public ownership of electric utilities, but that dispute wound up with Scripps-Howard's Editor George B. Parker eulogizing the magazine as "one of the best [ideas] in the whole history of education in America." Month ago Editor & Publisher, house organ of the daily newspaper publishing industry, assailed the News issue as "far from objective, far from scholarly . . . unfair," while the American Newspaper Guild's Guild Reporter found it "objective . . . penetrating . . . avoids both the movie versions and the florid house-organ ideology."

Editor of Building America is lean Dr. James E. Mendenhall, 34, a protege and collaborator of Teachers College's famed Professor Harold Rugg. Dr. Mendenhall went from Kansas to the Lincoln School as a research man in 1928, conceived Building America with Stanford's Professor Paul R. Hanna. It is regularly used in Detroit, Sacramento and Denver classes, in many a school and reference library elsewhere. About 110,000 copies of the entire series have been distributed. For the Power issue the largest single customer was the power industry itself, which took 1,000 copies.

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