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“This is a much-needed collection that sheds light on perhaps taken-for-granted
rhetoric, practices, and policies that frame children from deficit discourses.”
—Candace R. Kuby, University of Missouri, USA
“This is one of the defining reads in critical early childhood studies. Fikile Nxu-
malo and Christopher P. Brown unpack, challenge and disrupt the dominant
discourses in early childhood education with leaders of the field. The collection is
a beautifully written and curated collection of important and ground-breaking
texts.”
—Marek Tesar, University of Auckland, NZ
“This book is an urgent call to action against the suffocating and persistent power
of deficit-based thinking, policy and practice that affirms children’s right to a
childhood that is not framed and defined by pathologizing discourse, widening
gaps, risk factors, and other oppressive labels.”
—Beth Blue Swadener, Arizona State University, USA
DISRUPTING AND COUNTERING
DEFICITS IN EARLY CHILDHOOD
EDUCATION
This powerful edited collection disrupts the deficit-oriented discourses that cur-
rently frame the field of early childhood education (ECE) and illuminates avenues
for critique and opportunities for change. Researchers from across the globe offer
their insight and expertise in challenging the logic within ECE that often frames
children and their families through gaps, risks, and deficits across such issues as
poverty, language, developmental psychology, teaching, and learning. Chapters
propose practical responses to these manufactured crises and advocate for demo-
cratic practices and policies that enable ECE programs to build on the wealth of
cultural and personal knowledge children and families bring to the early learning
process. Moving beyond a dependence on deficits, this book offers opportunities
for scholars, researchers, and students to consider their practices in early education
and develop their understanding of what it means to be an educator who seeks to
support all children.
Fikile Nxumalo is Assistant Professor of Diversity and Place in Teaching and

Teacher Education in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, at
the Ontario Institute for Studies of Education, University of Toronto.
Christopher P. Brown is Professor of Early Childhood Education in the

Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin.
He is a Faculty Fellow with The Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis
and at the Center for Health and Social Policy at the LBJ School of Public
Affairs. He is also the Past-Chair for the Early Education/Child Development
Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association.
DISRUPTING AND
COUNTERING DEFICITS
IN EARLY CHILDHOOD
EDUCATION
Edited by Fikile Nxumalo and

Christopher P. Brown
First published 2020
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Fikile Nxumalo and Christopher P. Brown to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-10353-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-10354-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-10269-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Taylor & Francis Books
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ix
List of contributors xi
1 Introducing the Text and Examining the Emergence,

Maintenance, and Expansion of Gaps, Deficits, and Risks
through Early Childhood Policy 1
2 Dismantling Racialized Discourses in Early Childhood
Education and Care: A Revolution towards Reframing the
Field 20
Michelle Salazar Pérez
3 Pláticas on Disrupting Language Ideologies in the Borderlands 37
Cinthya M. Saavedra and J. Joy Esquierdo
4 Rejecting Deficit Views of Children in Poverty in Favor of a
Philosophy of Abundance 53
Curt Dudley-Marling
5 A Capability-Oriented Lens: Reframing the Early Years
Education of Children with Disabilities 67
Maryam Dalkilic
viii Contents
6 Fighting for the Unity of Care and Education in Early

Childhood: Understanding and Disrupting Challenges to
Professional Knowledge and Action 83
Patricia M. Cooper
7 Disrupting Standardized Early Education through Culturally
Sustaining Pedagogies with Young Children 103
Ranita Cheruvu
8 Deconstructing Child Rights in Special Educational Needs:
Representations of Deficit and Development in Educational
Psychology 119
Laura Goodfellow and Erica Burman
9 More-than-Human Kinship Relations within Indigenous
Children’s Picture Books 136
Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Meagan Montpetit
10 Listening to and Telling a Rush of Unruly Natureculture
Gender Stories 151
Mindy Blaise and Tonya Rooney
11 Disrupting Racial Capitalist Formations in Early Childhood
Education 164
Fikile Nxumalo
Index 179
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I begin with gratitude for relations with particular lands and waters—relations that
are inseparable from my scholarly work. I am thankful for living and learning
with eSwatini lands, the territories of the Coast Salish peoples, and with Yana
wana in Austin, Texas.
Thank you to all the contributors to this collection; it has been a joy to work
with all of you and learn from your brilliant articulations of the imperative of
countering the deficit discourses that continue to circulate in our field of early
childhood education. Thank you to Dr. Christopher P. Brown for the wonderful
experience of collaborating with you on this book, and to our dear colleague Dr.
Jennifer Keys Adair for her constant support.
Thank you to my family, especially my daughters Aiyana and Leilani, whose
support is everything to me.
Fikile Nxumalo
Personally, I’d like to thank my wife, Michele, for her love and support as I’ve
continued to progress through the academy, and to our three daughters, Camille,
Vivienne, and Lucille, for always reminding me what’s really important in life.
Professionally, I’d like to thank those across my academic trajectory that have
challenged me to question the status quo and see the brilliance and capabilities in
children and their families: Dr. Peterman and Peters at Sewanee, Drs. Cahill,
Theilheimer, Stile, and Ortiz at New Mexico State, and Drs. Graue, Bloch, Price,
Ladson- Billings, Apple, O’Day, Gomez, Hess, Popkewitz, Reynolds, Hassett,
and many more, including fellow students and friends, at the University of Wis-
consin-Madison. To my colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin: specifi-
cally, Dr. Jennifer Keys Adair for being a terrific colleague in early childhood
x Acknowledgements
education and to all the wonderful folks who I have the good fortune to work
with at UT-Austin on a daily basis. Thanks to the groups of early childhood
researchers and teacher educators at such organizations as the Early Education and
Child Development and Critical Perspectives in Early Childhood SIGs of AERA
and the Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education group for not only
allowing me to share and develop my work across multiple venues and outlets
but also for expanding my thinking around the issues that are central to this book.
I also want to thank all of the teachers, parents, administrators, policymakers,
researchers, and others who have allowed me to study what it is that they do.
Those experiences have shaped me in so many different ways, and more impor-
tantly, they helped me see the need for a text like this. I’d like to thank Dr.
Nancy File for putting me in touch with Alex Masulis at Taylor and Francis.
Speaking of Taylor & Francis, I’d like to thank Alex, Misha Kydd, Katie Patong,
Emmalee Ortega, and everyone else at Taylor & Francis in helping Dr. Nxumalo
and myself with putting this book together. Their patience and kindness are
much appreciated.
Finally, I’d like to thank all of the researchers who contributed to this book
and those who have written endorsements for this text. Without their work and
their support, this project would not be possible. Moreover, I’d like to thank my
colleague, Dr. Fikile Nxumalo, for all she taught me throughout this process.
Learning from her has been a life-changing experience.
CONTRIBUTORS
Mindy Blaise is a Vice Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow at Edith

Cowan University, Western Australia. Mindy is a co-founding member (with
Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Western University, Canada and Affrica Taylor,
University of Canberra, Australia) of the Common Worlds Research Collective.
Mindy is currently conducting feminist, interdisciplinary, and Anthropocene-
responsive research about children’s relations with water, waste, and weather in
Perth, Western Australia.
Christopher P. Brown is a Professor of Early Childhood Education in the

Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin.
He is an award-winning researcher and teacher educator who examines how
education stakeholders across a range of political and educational contexts make
sense of and respond to policymakers’ reforms. Through this work, his goal is to
understand and advocate for early learning environments that foster, sustain, and
extend the complex educational, cultural, and individual goals and aspirations of
teachers, children, and their families.
Erica Burman is Professor of Education, Manchester Institute of Education

(MIE), University of Manchester, and a United Kingdom Council of Psy-
chotherapists-registered Group Analyst. She is well known as a critical devel-
opmental psychologist and methodologist specializing in innovative and
activist qualitative research. She is author of Deconstructing Developmental Psy-
chology (Routledge, 3rd edition, 2017), Developments: Child, Image, Nation
(Routledge, 2008), and of Fanon, Education, Action: Child as Method (Routle-
dge, 2019). She currently leads the Knowledge, Power and Identity research
strand at MIE, and is past Chair of the Psychology of Women Section of the
xii List of contributors
British Psychological Society. In 2016 she was awarded an Honorary Lifetime

Fellowship of the Society.
Ranita Cheruvu is an Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at

William Paterson University. Her scholarship and teaching focus on culturally
relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogies in early childhood education and
teacher education. Using critical race theory and sociocultural perspectives she
examines the preparation of teachers of Color and multiculturally responsive
teacher education practices.
Patricia M. “Patsy” Cooper is an Associate Professor of Early Childhood

Education at Queens College, CUNY, where she also directs the graduate tea-
cher education programs in early childhood. She began her career as a preschool
and kindergarten teacher in Chicago and then school director in Houston. Her
interest in teacher education led to the founding of the School Literacy and
Culture Project at Rice University. Cooper is the author of numerous articles and
chapters, including “Effective White Teachers of Black Children: Teaching
Within a Community” (2003), “One Authentic Early Literacy Practice and
Three Standardized Tests: Can A Storytelling Curriculum Measure Up?” (2007),
“Preparing Multicultural Educators in an Age of Teacher Evaluation Systems:
Necessary Stories From Field Supervision” (2014), and “The Enduring and
Evolving Nature of Early Childhood Care and Education” (2019). She is also the
author of The Classrooms All Young Children Need: Lessons in Teaching from Vivian
Paley, which won AERA’s Exemplary Research in Teaching and Teacher Edu-
cation award.
Maryam Dalkilic is a doctoral student in Human Development, Learning and

Culture in the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology at the
University of British Columbia. A former school counselor and preschool director
in Turkey and a childcare program supervisor in Canada, Maryam’s research
examines potential ways to enhance the experiences of children with disabilities,
their families, and early childhood educators, as a system of interconnected indi-
viduals who are affected by early childhood education practices.
Curt Dudley-Marling is Professor Emeritus at Boston College. His teaching

and scholarship focus broadly on language and literacy development and disability
studies. Overall his work stands as a critique of the deficit thinking that patholo-
gizes the language, culture, and communities of children for whom school is
often a struggle including students with disabilities and children in poverty.
J. Joy Esquierdo is Professor of Bilingual and Literacy Studies and Director of

The Center for Bilingual Studies at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
Her research centers on quality bilingual/dual language enrichment education,
List of contributors xiii
gifted and talented education and the cognitive development of bilingual chil-
dren. Her research agenda includes topics that focus on the development of
bilingualism, biliteracy, and biculturalism of Latin@ children. Her work is pub-
lished in the Journal of Bilingual Education Research and Instruction and International
Journal of Instruction, and two books published by Kendall/Hunt Publishing
Company.
Laura Goodfellow took her undergraduate degree in psychology at the Uni-

versity of Surrey, and completed a MSc in Community Psychology at Manche-
ster Metropolitan University, and also a Post-graduate Diploma in Youth and
Community Studies at De Montfort University to become a qualified Youth
Worker. She is currently a doctoral student at the University of Manchester
studying how children’s rights are understood and enacted in educational psy-
chology, local government and policy. Alongside academia, she works for a third
sector children’s charity focused on children’s rights and social justice.
Meagan Montpetit is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Education at Western

University. Meagan’s doctoral research extends on her work as a pedagogist in
London, ON and engages with child/more-than-human assemblages. Thinking
with posthuman feminism, Meagan’s research highlights the sometimes-messy
tensions that emerge in the nuanced spaces she explores with children.
Fikile Nxumalo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculu

m, Teaching & Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE),
University of Toronto. Her work is centered on environmental and place-attuned
early childhood education that is situated within and responsive to children’s
inheritances of settler colonialism, anti-blackness and environmental precarity. Her
book, Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education (Routledge, 2019)
examines the entanglements of place, environmental education, childhood, race,
and settler colonialism in early learning contexts on unceded Coast Salish territories
in British Columbia, Canada.
Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw is a Professor of Early Childhood Education in

the Faculty of Education at Western University in Ontario, Canada. She is the
co-director of the Ontario Centre of Excellence in Early Years and Child Care,
and the British Columbia Early Childhood Pedagogies Network. Her writing and
research contribute to Common World Childhoods Research Collective (tracing
children’s relations with places, materials, and other species), and the Early
Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory (experimenting with the contours, condi-
tions, and complexities of 21st-century pedagogies). Veronica is currently the
principal investigator of the SSHRC Insight Grant Transforming Waste Pedago-
gies in Early Childhood Education, and the SSHRC Partnership Development
Grant Exploring Climate Change Pedagogies with Children.
xiv List of contributors
Tonya Rooney is a Lecturer in Early Childhood Education at the Australian

Catholic University. Tonya’s research focuses children's relations with space, time
and more-than-human worlds in contemporary society, and more recently looks
to the scenario of Anthropogenic climate change and what this means for young
children's lives and futures. Tonya is author of several articles, book chapters and a
co-edited book (Surveillance Futures, with Emmeline Taylor, Routledge, 2017).
Cinthya M. Saavedra is Associate Professor and Academic Director of Mexican

American Studies at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Her research
centers Chicana/Latina feminist epistemology in educational research. In addition,
her scholarship addresses Chicana feminist critical methodologies such as testi-
monios, pláticas and critical reflexivity. Her work is published in Review of
Research in Education, Equity & Excellence in Education, the International Journal of
Qualitative Studies in Education, and TESOL Quarter.
Michelle Salazar Pérez is the Interim Associate Dean for Research in the Col-
lege of Education at New Mexico State University. She holds the J. Paul Taylor
Endowed Professorship and is Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education.
She uses women of color feminist perspectives to examine dominant construc-
tions of childhoods, particularly how they influence public policy and subjugate
the lived experiences of marginalized people/s. She is co-editor of a special issue
in Global Studies of Childhood, which centers global south onto-epistemologies in
childhood studies. Her work has been published in Teachers College Record, Equity
& Excellence in Education, Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, and Review of
Research in Education.
1
INTRODUCING THE TEXT AND
EXAMINING THE EMERGENCE,
MAINTENANCE, AND EXPANSION OF
GAPS, DEFICITS, AND RISKS
THROUGH EARLY CHILDHOOD
POLICY
The catalyst for this book was a level of discomfort felt by both Dr. Nxumalo and
myself over the framing of early childhood education (ECE) across a range of
contexts throughout the world (e.g., UNICEF, 2016). Essentially, children are
born into a world in which they are often defined as lacking across a range of
developmental, cultural, linguistic, and individual domains. As such, they require
early interventions to correct as well as inoculate them against current and future
gaps, risks, and deficits so that society will not have to be burdened by them as
they become adults. Moreover, those involved in children’s lives, be it their
families or the early educators who work with them on a daily basis, are often
framed as lacking as well (e.g., Reardon & Portilla, 2016).
While our discomfort over issues of gaps, deficits, and risk have been felt by many
throughout the fields of ECE specifically (e.g., Cannella, 1997; Heydon & Iannacci,
2008; Swadener & Lubeck, 1995) and in education in general for decades (e.g., Mar-
gonis, 1992), we feel this current response is needed because the field of ECE is in a
precarious position. It is currently riding a global wave of interest from a range of sta-
keholders in and outside the field. This interest has arisen from the findings of
researchers representing a variety of disciplines demonstrating the positive impact, both
proximal and distal, of high quality early education experiences on young children
deemed at-risk for school success (e.g., Reynolds, Ou, & Temple, 2018).
Policymakers and advocates for early education (e.g., Heckman, 2000) have taken
up these findings to argue for the expansion of access to such programs as publicly
supported pre-kindergarten (Pre-K) to address such policy problems as the word and/
or language gap, academic achievement gap, the executive function gap, physical-fit-
ness gap, school-to-prison pipeline, and even a military readiness gap (e.g., www.
2 C. P. Brown
championsforamericasfuture.org; www.missionreadiness.org; www.readynation.org).

This gapification of ECE defines the field is neoliberal (economic) rather than demo-
cratic terms; that is, investing in ECE will save taxpayers money in the long run by
reducing the likelihood that these at-risk children and their families who participate in
these programs will need additional educational and/or social services.
Still, many have picked up this human capital argument and employed it to argue
for access to high-quality early education as an equity issue (Britto, 2012). For example,
failing to provide access to such programs perpetuates the status quo (Ahmad &
Hamm, 2013). Still, at its core, this neoliberal argument frames children as human
capital whose “gaps” must be filled (e.g., https://cehd.uchicago.edu), and as such, this
argument dismisses the notion of government as a public interest that needs to educate
its future citizens and support the growth and development of families it serves.
We worry that such rhetoric and research positions the field of ECE as being
dependent upon finding risk in children, their families, and possibly their early educa-
tors to receive government support. Without these gaps, risks, and deficits, the logic
undergirding the need for ECE within the current political and policy discourses falls
to the wayside. Thus, researchers, advocates, and policymakers who support ECE are
often dependent upon positioning children and their families as potential failures.
We contend that logic must be disrupted and alternative conceptions of early edu-
cation proposed to counter the increasing dependency on gaps, risks, and deficits, be it
in the child or the family, for governmental, empirical, and practical support for the
field of ECE. Thus, we sought the insight and expertise of researchers from across the
globe who examine issues central to ECE and asked them to offer a critique of and
response to deficit-oriented rhetoric in ECE policy and practice. This book represents
a collection of their thinking around such issues as poverty, language, developmental
psychology, teaching, and learning.
Before turning to their expertise on these and many other issues that interact with
the care and education of young children and their families, I provide some history
about how gaps, risks, and deficits emerged within ECE policy within the United
States (U.S.), and I provide some insight into how others, who are not a part of this
text, have thought about addressing the issues I highlight in this chapter. I also intro-
duce you, the reader, to the chapters that present in this text and how these dis-
tinguished authors unpack the logic of gaps, risks, and deficits across a range of issue
and offer strategies to counter such thinking within ECE.
The Emergence and Maintenance of Gaps, Deficits, and Risk in

ECE Policy within the U.S.
Head Start
One of the primary drivers for this continued focus on gaps, deficits, and risk in general
and ECE specifically in the U.S. was the emergence of Project Head Start in 1965
under the Economic Opportunity Act and the Elementary and Secondary Education
Introducing the Text 3
Act (ESEA) as a part of the Johnson Administration’s War on Poverty. While the
emergence of other ECE programs in the U.S., such as kindergarten, were often
framed by advocates as a form “child rescue” or the Americanization of the influx of
immigrants that were arriving in the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th century
(Beatty, 1995), Head Start was different. It was a federally-funded government pro-
gram designed solely to provide children and their families deemed “at-risk” for school
success with a head start so that what these policymakers framed as the “cycle of pov-
erty” could be broken. These policies identified the cause of academic and economic
failure in the child’s home environment.
While legislators were stating that poor children have the capacity to succeed
in school, which has not always been in the case in the U.S., they also promoting
a conceptual framing of families through what Keddie (1973) and others (e.g.,
Banks, 2004; Pearl, 1997) have identified as cultural deprivation theory. At the
same time, they were enacting theory of action (Argyris & Schon, 1974) to
address this policy problem with reforms that defined Head Start as necessary
early learning experience that can prepare children and their families for later
academic and economic success. This framing of how ECE “works” continues
through the promotion of neoliberal reforms that frame ECE as a form of human
capital development.
Standards-Based Accountability (SBA) Reform

While Head Start only marked low-income children and their families as being at-
risk for school success, the standards-based accountability movement identified even
more children and families as possessing gaps, risks, and deficits. This movement
emerged from the release of such reports as the National Commission in Excellence
in Education’s (NCEE) publication of A Nation at Risk (National Commission in
Excellence in Education, 1984), which framed the entire education system at risk,
and the nation’s governors pursuit of education reform initiatives that sought to affect
change through employing academic accountability as a means to improve student
performance (e.g., National Governor’s Association, 1986). While there were coali-
tions and researchers (e.g., National Coalition of Advocates for Students, 1985) who
attempted “to elucidate the institutional and structural forces that placed children at
risk, at-risk status was commonly reduced to an internalized trait or inherent char-
acteristic and rapidly became synonymous with ‘minority’ status” (O’Connor, Hill,
& Robinson, 2009, p. 2).
Politically speaking, these calls for reform led to President George H. W. Bush’s
failed America 2000 legislation that eventually became the Clinton Administration’s
Goals 2000 legislation, which made its first goal that every child in the U.S. would
start school ready to learn. As such, large portions of children, primarily children from
low-income families, children of color, immigrant children, and children who do not
speak “White dialects of English” (Alim, 2005), were seen as not being ready for
school (National Education Goals Panel, 1993). Thus, children, prior to kindergarten
4 C. P. Brown
entry must be measured, and if deemed not ready for school, interventions provided.
However, rather than use this legislation to expand access to ECE, many within the
field worried that this legislation would lead to the inappropriate use of assessments to
determine kindergarten entry (Gnezda, & Bolig, 1988; Meisels, 1992), which in turn,
could be used to deny children access to “participating in the school curriculum”
necessary to succeed in elementary school (Shepard, 1994, p. 207).
As policymakers across the U.S. focused on readying at-risk children for school,
other nations were also focusing in on this same issue through a range of reform
initiatives (Dockett & Perry, 2015). For instance, Australian researchers began to
take interest in the age of children at school entry in the 1990s (Gifford, 1992).
Moreover, organizations such as UNICEF (2002) began to employ similar lan-
guage as the NEGP when advocating for providing opportunities to prepare
children across the world for school success.
The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act

This history of educational failure and gaps, deficits, and risk laid the groundwork
for NCLB, which employed severe accountability measures to motivate school
personnel to improve children’s academic achievement. The marker of success
under NCLB was through the adequate yearly progress (AYP) of students on
their state’s academic achievement tests, and if schools and/or districts failed to
improve student performance, the consequences were an opening for market-
based interventions, such as families accessing tutorial services run by private
companies.
This focus on the AYP of students in reading, math, and science led to stakeholders
paying further attention to what types of leaning experiences children had prior to the
mandatory third grade tests (Brown, 2007)—that is, do kindergarteners, first, and
second graders possess the skills the state assessments demand they have? Schools
responded to this pressure by shoving down (Hatch, 2002) the content and perfor-
mance expectations and the didactic instructional practices of the older grades into
younger-grade classrooms. This shovedown not only frames learning as a lock-step
process where student outcomes demonstrate the effectiveness of teachers, but it also
further erases the individual, cultural, and developmental abilities to and desires for
learning among children and their families from the curriculum.
Additionally, the George W. Bush Administration implemented the Good
Start, Grow Smart (GSGS) initiative (Office of the White House, 2002). Part of
GSGS directed early childhood stakeholders at the state level to define and align a
set of pre-reading, language, and mathematics knowledge and skills with the
content and performance standards found in elementary school. In doing so,
policymakers narrowed the purpose of publicly-funded ECE programs as a school
readiness programs that increased students’ academic skills and knowledge so that
they were prepared to attain high levels of academic performance as they entered
elementary school, which in turn would close the achievement gap.
In nations such as Australia (Sumsion & Wong, 2011) and New Zealand (Duhn,
2010), policymakers adopted national curricula that inform all stakeholders about what
children should be learning and doing each step of the way in their early education
systems. Such policies, which MacNaughton (2007) framed as a “technocratic ‘quick
fix’ model of change” (p. 193) have been shown to alter the expectations (e.g., Jones &
Osgood, 2007) and practices (e.g., Booher-Jennings, 2005) of public school teachers in
varying countries around the world (e.g., Jensen et al., 2010).
The Continued Push for Accountability

NCLB amplified the idea that large numbers of children and their families are entering
public education with a range of gaps and deficits that put them at risk for school
success. Such legislation mirrors the history of education reform in the U.S. where
policymakers have used education reform as a means to control the social, economic,
and political participation of those who have been “othered.” For instance, 19th-cen-
tury immigrants “as ardent Americanizers saw it, not only had to learn new skills but
also had to shed an old culture” (Tyack, 1974, p. 235). Moreover, this push for
accountability that delineated NCLB from earlier federal reforms has been furthered by
policymakers through such recent SBA initiatives as: the Obama Administration’s Race
to the Top-Early Learning Challenge Grant (RTT-ELC) in 2013, Common Core, and the
passage of Every Students Succeeds Act in 2015, which replaced NCLB (Pérez, 2018).
Even prior to entering elementary school, policy documents, such as Head Start’s
Early Learning Outcomes Framework (Administration for Children and Families,
2015), Pre-K operating guidelines that mandate the implementation of specific curri-
cula (e.g., Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning, 2018), or state mandated
early learning standards (e.g., Scott-Little et al., 2006), demonstrate how policymakers’
SBA reforms have been shoved down into the early years. For example, the Head Start
framework presents specific age-based achievement goals children are expected to
attain across several developmental domains (approaches to learning; social emotional
development; language and literacy; cognition; perceptual, motor, and physical devel-
opment) from zero to age five. Not only does this framework create more opportu-
nities to find gaps/deficits and identify risks in children and their families, Bullough Jr.,
Hall-Kenyon, MacKay, & Marshall (2014) found the requirements for increased use of
student and teacher assessments within Head Start overwhelmed classroom teachers
and forced them to engage in practices that conflict “with what they believe most
needs to be done for the children” (p. 63).
Essentially, policymakers’ reforms have brushed aside a core belief within the history
of ECE that curricular decisions should be based on the individual personal, socio-
cultural, linguistic, and developmental capabilities of children (Brown, 2009). These
policies create an ECE context in which “learning becomes nothing more than a
means to an end”; its “inherent value is lost” and children never get “the chance to
experience the exhilaration of learning as an inherently valuable human activity”
(Hatch, 2015, p. 115). At the same time, these policies also position the field of ECE as
6 C. P. Brown
a governmental investment in children in which programs must produce successful

learners who become earners and consumers that will repay the state for these initial
costs by requiring less governmental support and paying taxes through employment in
later life (Ailwood, 2008). Moreover, such a teaching environment requires early
educators to demonstrate their worth through their ability to produce students who
attain high test scores while also making them be “salespeople for their own pedago-
gical performances” so that they are not replaced, which can also lead to competition
among teachers within a school community (De Lissovoy, 2014, p. 428).
This focus on outcomes and returns perpetuates a system of education that searches
for as well as identified gaps, risks, and deficits in young children and their families.
Meaning ECE is no longer a journey that is to provides children and their families with
learning experiences designed to prepare them to become active and engaged mem-
bers of the larger democratic society. Instead, early childhood teachers and programs
are to “focus on readiness in the now;” meaning they are to enact a standardized vision
of schooling that prepares children for a constant barrage of assessments that begin as
soon as they enter public schooling and continuously grow in expectations as they
progress from one grade level to the next (Brown, 2013, p. 570).
Responding to these Reforms

Throughout this history of reform in the U.S. and across the globe, many have ques-
tioned the intention of policymakers (e.g., Brown, 2008) and the role of schooling and
other public institutions within this process (e.g., Valencia, 1997). Categorically
speaking, these analysis and responses to this focus by policymakers in reducing the
gaps, eliminating risks, or addressing deficits in children and their families have framed
their arguments either institutionally, politically, or practically. In doing so, their goals
have been to illuminate negative impacts of these socially constructed gaps, risks, and
deficits while offering strategies to counter such logic. While over the years researchers
have put forward a range of arguments questioning the logic of these gaps, risks, and
deficits across each category, I highlight just a few to illuminate the avenues for critique
as well as the opportunities for change that may counter these systems, policies, and
practices that perpetuate deficits in ECE.
Institutional Responses
Institutionally speaking, researchers such as Varenne and McDermott (1998) contend
that “we” must turn our focus away from success and/or failure of the individual and
her cultural affiliation and refocus on the dominant American cultural perspectives
towards schooling. For these researchers, the categories of success and failure are
“arbitrary and [fail] to capture what it is children do” (p. 4). The American education
system is set up in such a way that nearly everyone is eventually marked as lacking/at-
risk in some area and is assigned their place in the structure, and yet, “there is no evi-
dence that it must be this way” (p. xii). When applying their argument to theory of
action that currently defines the field of ECE, it extends as well as brings to light the
flaws in this logic. For example, why must ECE be a vehicle designed to ready chil-
dren for school by improving children’s academic achievement at a reasonable cost?
Such logic not only is dependent on producing particular types of children at the risk
of losing political and financial support, but it also leaves the larger system of education
unchecked, which perpetuates the system Varenne and McDermott (1998) believe we
must turn away from in order to promote institutional change.
Valencia (1997) takes a different tack by analyzing the constructs of risks, deficits, and
failure through what he terms deficit thinking. He contends that the current system of
education that ensures the success of some at the cost of failing others subsists due to
deficit thinking, which posits that a student who fails in school does so because of
internal deficits or deficiencies. Such thinking allows for “how schools are organized to
prevent learning, inequalities in the political economy of education, and oppressive
macropolicies in education are all held exculpatory in understanding school failure”
(p. 2). Valencia (1997) unpacks this construct by examining six characteristics of deficit
thinking, which include blaming the victim, oppression, pseudoscience, temporal
changes, educability, and Bourdieu’s notion of heterodoxy, so that this system that
allows for failure to perpetuate can be reformed.
Finally, Qvortrup (2009) and others (e.g., Corsaro, 2015) contend that structurally
the notion of childhood needs to be rethought. Rather than simply consider child-
hood as a time in life, it should be seen as a structural form. By making it a permanent
form/category within society, it becomes more apparent as to the need for govern-
ment to support this structure for all its citizens. Qvortrup (2009) argued that it would
“mean taking a much keener interest in realizing children’s rights to a decent living
standard, and their rights to be taken seriously as claim-makers and right-holders,
economically, socially and politically” (p. 647). While the neoliberal notion of invest-
ment is entwined in this logic, its focus is not on what types of citizens the government
is producing, but instead, it centers on what types of childhoods it is supporting. Thus,
rather than seek out gaps, risks, and deficits to fix in order to prevent later failure,
identifying childhood as structural form focuses in on what needs to be done to
improve the immediate quality of life for all children.
Political Responses
Political responses to gaps, risks, and deficits are designed to attend to a policy
problem. Within the current movements shaping ECE in the U.S. and across the
globe, the problems tend to center around the issues of school readiness and
academic achievement. Both identify gaps in children and their families (e.g.,
Reynolds & Temple, 2019), and the solution often includes offering either access
to early childhood programs or standardizing these programs by mandating the
implementation of specific content and the use of standardized assessments so that
children and their families “receive” the knowledge and skills needed to succeed
in the schooling system as their policy solution.
8 C. P. Brown
Policymakers’ focus on readiness and academic achievement via standards and

accountability measures not only privileges certain types of knowledge and silences
others (Brown & Brown, 2010), but their reforms also often “suggest that a small group
of students are educationally and economically vulnerable” and need “to be isolated and
fixed” (Fine, 1988, p. 16). Brown and Lan (2015) contend that these reforms are pro-
moting a standardized White, middle-class conception of school readiness and academic
achievement. Moreover, as Moss (2010) pointed out, this framing of EC as vehicle that
readies at-risk children for school, or for the next transition within the system (e.g.,
college readiness) creates a monologic discourse in which “each successive stage of the
system is … to make clear to those in the stage below them what they expect and need
from children when passed up to them” (p. 14). This discourse not only creates a policy
environment in which gaps, risks, and deficits thrive, but children are also the ones who
take the blame if for not being ready for the educational system. Additionally, this
simple framing of the field of ECE as the solution to these complex problems ignores
the other factors that contribute to children’s readiness for or performance in school,
which include access to health care and a consistent/reliable source of food as well as the
familial issues of employment, parental leave, and so on (Britto, 2012).
To counter this deficit-oriented political framing of ECE, Moss (2010) asserts that the
field of ECE can no longer continue to promote a neoliberal policy framing that focuses
on fostering markets of early learning instead of democracy. By taking a neoiberal policy
approach towards ECE, Moss noted that inequity becomes the necessary driver of
competition, and consumption becomes a normalized understanding of the early
learning process. To counter such political logic, Moss wants ECE to connect with a
range of movements that promote democracy and a sustainable and flourishing society,
which he connects with the act of creating possibilities for the education of young
children rather than pursuing outcome-based goals.
Organizations such as the National Association for the Education of Young Children
have and continue to put forward position statements that attempt to counter the out-
comes-based logic Moss is critiquing (National Association for the Education of Young
Children, 1995, 2009). Yet, as Mathias Urban pointed out, many governments across
the globe continue to promote a system of ECE that maintains the status quo in relation
to gaps, risks, and deficits. He contends that, we, as a field,
need to ask in whose interest it is to keep significant (and growing) parts of

the population in poverty… Instead of presenting exclusion as something that
marginalised groups suffer from … we would have to begin to acknowledge
that exclusion is an activity — it is done to people by someone.
(Urban, 2015, p. 300)
Moreover, the fields of ECE in what terms “European mainstream approaches to

early childhood education and care,” as well as programs in the U.S., “have not
made a difference with regard to the ‘outcomes’ for the most marginalised chil-
dren” (Urban, 2015, p. 300).
He, as well as many others (e.g., Souto-Manning, 2018), believes Europe as

well as other Western nations should turn our focus away from the dominant
what works discourse, and instead, look to “initiatives, policies and practices made
by ‘developing’ countries, and by and with indigenous communities” to move
beyond the risk, gaps, and deficits framings of children and families so that ECE
programs can build off of the wealth of cultural and personal knowledge children
and families bring to the early learning process (Urban, 2015, p. 301).
This ontological (nature of reality) and epistemological (nature of knowledge)
shift, which others have advocated for in the past (e.g., Ladson-Billings, 2000),
calls into question how “we,” as a field, make sense of early childhood education
both politically and practically. For instance, Pérez and Saavedra (2017) contend
that ECE needs to move away from what they term global north onto-epis-
temologies (Eurocentric conceptions of being and knowing that impact societies
throughout the world through intellectual and cultural colonization) to global
south onto-epistemologies that decolonize and disrupt global north dominance
by centering the lived ways of knowing and being of minoritized peoples. This
framing of early learning and education will disrupt the logic of gaps, risks, and
deficits that define the current neoliberal framing of ECE, and in doing so, Pérez
and Saavedra (2017) argue it will assist those in ECE to center its practices and
beliefs around the brilliance of children and communities of color and the funds
of knowledge they bring to the early learning process (Moll, Amanti, Neff, &
González, 1992). For policy, this means the knowledge and lived experiences of
the communities being served by ECE become the foundation for identifying
policy “problems” and generating solutions that seek to address and eliminate
such challenges from children and their families’ lives. To do this requires early
education stakeholders to investigate and document the lived experiences of these
ECE stakeholders (e.g., Hubard et al., 2018).
Still, there are those who tend to operate in global north onto-epistemologies,
such a myself (e.g., Brown, 2018), who note that it’s not only looking to the
brilliance of the communities for ways forward, but it also our responsibility
as researchers examining policy issues to ask policymakers how they see
themselves contributing to an education system that continues to allow stu-
dents to “fail” and what system/structures they see inside and outside educa-
tion that they believe could be altered to increase ensure success for all
students (Brown, 2008). In essence, education stakeholders must take up what
Stone (1998) noted as our ethical responsibility to examine how “we” parti-
cipate in the political structuring of children and their families as successes and
failures so that we can begin to pursue solutions that alter these systems of
risk, gaps, and deficits. Others, such as Loh and Hu (2014), contend members
of the ECE community need to develop a “neoliberal literacy” (p. 20) so that
they can “discern the complexity of this reform process as well as imagine
possibilities for resisting or countering these policies in their classrooms,
schools, and local communities” (Brown, 2009, p. 254).
10 C. P. Brown
Practical Responses
While one of the main objectives of this text is to examine practical responses to
the manufactured crisis of risk, gaps, and deficits of children and their families, I
do want to provide some insight into how the ECE community in the U.S. (e.g.,
Brown & Mowry, 2017) and abroad (e.g., Gupta, 2015) is responding to and
countering these manufactured crises of risk, gaps, and deficits of children and
their families—both from a global north and a global south perspective. Both sets
of researchers, teachers, and advocates are seeking ways to dismantle this depen-
dency on risk, gaps, and deficits so that members of ECE can become what Meier
(2000) termed “agents of democracy” (p. 17) who advocate for democratic
practices and policies throughout the education system that support the education
of all children.
To begin, the impact of these neoliberal ECE reforms on early educators’
practices is well documented (e.g., Nxumalo, Pacini-Ketchabaw, & Rowan,
2011). Both quantitative and qualitative studies have shown that early educators
in public school contexts are increasingly standardized assessments, spending less
time on child-selected activities, music, and art, and are focused on teaching
children through whole-class, teacher-centered didactic instructional practices
(Alford, Rollins, Padrón, & Waxman, 2016; Bassok, Latham, & Rorem, 2016).
This standardized vision of teaching and learning that appears to project an
image of White, middle-class conception of schooling has been shown to
perpetuate deficits, gaps, and risks. For example, Adair, Colegrove, &
McManus (2017) documented how Latinx children are denied opportunities
to participate in what are considered best-practices in ECE that offer them
choice and voice in their learning because education stakeholders, such as
superintendents, administrators, teachers, parents, and even young children,
believed, via the perpetuation of the myth of Hart and Risley’s (1995) word
gap, they lacked the vocabulary needed to do so. Lee (2017) has also shown
how teachers can latch on to such dominant discourses as school readiness and
ADHD to not only view young children through a deficit perspective, which
in her study were two African-American pre-kindergarteners, but early edu-
cators can also use these discourses to control children’s bodies and actions
while ignoring the strengths and interests they bring to the classroom that
should be incorporated into the curriculum (Saavedra & Marx, 2016).
To move forward, those whose work operates in the onto-epistemology of the
global north contend the logic of gaps, deficits, and risks must be rethought or recon-
ceptualized (e.g., Dahlberg, Moss, & Pence, 1999). For instance, MacNaughton (2007)
employed Derrida’s poststructural notion of deconstructionism to show how early
educators can pull apart the language of early childhood texts so that practitioners can
see how the meaning and language of practice is arbitrary, shifting, and contradictory
rather than fixed. By doing so, MacNaughton (2007) demonstrates how these texts
establish hierarchies of meaning through binaries (e.g., ready/unready) to establish
cultural standards of normality, and through these binaries, the “other” is produced—
the “other” being not equal to the main part of the pair, which for this example would
be the unready child (p. 98). MacNaughton’s work helps illuminate how the ideas,
concepts, or words we use in ECE, such as gaps, deficits, and risks, are provisional and
can be disrupted, which creates new opportunities for practitioners to rethink not only
their practices with young children and their families but also their understanding of
what it means to be an educator who seeks to support the growth and development of
all children.
Those working from in the onto-epistemologies of the global south, often
draw from Ladson-Billings’s (1994) notion of culturally relevant practices (e.g.,
see Chapter 7 by Ranita Cheruvu), which seeks to empower students “intellec-
tually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to impart
knowledge, skills, and attitudes” through practices that foster students’ academic
success, cultural competence, and sociopolitical consciousness (pp. 17–18), to
offer insight in how to support the cultural and linguistic strengths children and
their families bring to school. This construct of CRP has evolved to incorporate
the notions of sustaining cultural knowledge and practices (Paris, 2012) and
revitalizing these constructs as well as the languages of communities that have
been devastated by Western colonization (McCarty & Lee, 2014). For instance,
McCarty’s (2014) work illuminates the “young people’s often hidden multi-
lingual strengths, their pluricultural worlds, and the ways in which they and their
families and peers negotiate hybrid sociolinguistic ecologies” within their class-
room communities and the larger society (p. 265). Others, such as Howard
(2018), have employed Yosso’s (2005) cultural wealth model and her six notions
of capital, aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, and resistance, to
demonstrate how early educators can access, embrace, and tailor instruction based
on the assets children bring to school.
Within ECE specifically, researchers such as Nxumalo and Cedillo (2017), push
this notion of culturally sustaining practices even further by arguing for members
of the ECE community to consider implementing anti-racist (e.g., Doucet &
Adair, 2013), decolonial (e.g., Pérez & Saavedra, 2017), and non-anthropocentric
approaches (e.g., Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015) to teaching young children
and their families. Their goal being that “we,” as a field, seek new avenues to
assist us in moving beyond policymakers’ global north framing of the field
through a gaps, deficits, and risks.
To move forward from either a global north or global south onto-epistemol-
ogy requires, as O’Connor et al. (2009) noted, early educators to be aware of
“when, why, and under what conditions students” children are and are not
identified as possessing gaps, deficits, or risks (p. 26). In saying this, it is not as if
children are simply put in one category or another, but rather, as Harris and
Leonardo (2018) pointed out, we, as early educators, need to aware of how the
intersection of the identities children bring to school mark them as “problems
and possibilities” and how our practices and policies either limit or liberate
12 C. P. Brown
them (p. 19). Moreover, we must recognize how we contribute to the social
construction and enforcement of “social identities and inequities” in our own
early learning environments, which reflect larger institutions and reforms (Gillborn,
2015, p. 283).
In moving forward with this process of disrupting and countering gaps, risks,
and deficits in ECE, it is important to recognize that those who hold power
within the current systems of ECE and schooling in general will be reluctant to
relinquish it (Strallybrass & White, 1986; Apple, 2003). Thus, as you (and your
colleagues) seek out solutions and forms of resistance to the current neoliberal
logic of gaps, risks, and deficits, which include forming alliances and building
communities within schools across stakeholder groups, such as teachers,
administrators, families, community members outside of your work environ-
ment, it is important for everyone to recognize and understand that there are
“multiple perspectives” in understanding and enacting policymakers’ reforms.
In doing so, we all must “trouble social issues and normative perceptions in a
critically conscious manner” so that we can position ourselves as “agents of
change in [children’s] classrooms and beyond” (Souto-Manning, 2017, p. 96).
Outlining the Remainder of the Book

While my introduction by no means captures the complexity of responses that
have and are emerging to counter the logic of gaps, deficits, and risks, I hope it
brings to light how deeply rooted these notions of gaps, risks, and deficits are in
ECE as well as the need for this text. In the remaining chapters of this book, we
are truly lucky to present a range of chapters that seek to address the logic of gaps,
deficits and risks by challenging us to move “beyond [the] normalized Western
constructs of social science” and think about practices that we can engage in that
“center the realities, desires, and stories of the people with whom we work” (San
Pedro & Kinloch, 2017, p. 374). As Harris and Leonardo (2018) noted, the issues
the esteemed researchers in this text explore do not act in isolation from each
other, but rather, they “tug on each other” to demonstrate the multiple ways
children and their families must interact with discourses of gaps, risks, and deficits
as they progress through ECE and into larger educational systems (p. 15).
In Chapter 2, Michelle Salazar Pérez unpacks the social constructions of race
and how racialized, deficit-based discourses became and continue to be inscribed
in ECE. To counter these discourses, she offers early childhood scholars and
educators what she terms decolonial imaginary, which opens up a space to theo-
rize with the wisdoms and knowledges of the global south. By doing so, Pérez
contends that this can empower of young children of color.
In Chapter 3, Cinthya Saavedra and J. Joy Esquierdo unpack the language
ideologies that favor English over native and home languages in the South Texas
borderlands. By employing the Chicana feminist methodology known as pláticas,
they examine how ECE programs, schools, and communities are immersed
within colonialist ideas of language, and how they, as advocates for bilingualism,
are caught in the colonialist language nexus. Saavedra and Esquierdo then offer
counter-narratives to decolonize language practices and ideologies.
In Chapter 4, Curt Dudley-Marling examines how policy makers, politicians
and even some educators overlook the overwhelming evidence on the debilitat-
ing effects of poverty and blame poor children and their families for failing to
achieve academically and economically. Through his analysis of deficit thinking
around this issue, Dudley-Marling offers a philosophy of abundance, which is
based on the belief that all children (and their family members) are capable and
competent to counter this dominant philosophy of deficiency.
Maryam Dalkilic, in Chapter 5, offers the capability approach to counter
what she terms the hegemony of special education discourses, which regulate
children with disabilities at the expense of their freedom and valued educa-
tional experiences, and the dominant language of needs in ECE. By doing so,
Dalkilic’s goal is to advocate for practices that enable children with disabilities
more opportunities to be agents in their learning and to participate in deci-
sions that matter in their lives.
Patricia M. Cooper seeks to reclaim professional competency in the practice of
early childhood education. She does so by first unpacking the caretaker vs. edu-
cator tension, which has existed since the development of the field of ECE in the
U.S., and she demonstrates how this tension has led to particular problems for
and mischaracterizations of early childhood. Then, Cooper ends her chapter by
calling for a unity in purpose in teachers’ dual roles to begin to advocate for the
early childhood professional that she believes all children deserve.
In Chapter 7, Ranita Cheruvu seeks to disrupt the standardization of practices
within early childhood education that marginalize children of Color, immigrant
children from low income families, and children who are do not speak the
dominant form of American English. Cheruvu does so by offering examples of
culturally sustaining pedagogies in early childhood classrooms to uncover what
she frames as the possibilities for transformative pedagogies that seek to disrupt
standardization.
By drawing from a Foucauldian conception of discourse, Laura Goodfellow
and Erica Burman examine how perceptions of developmental deficits are pro-
duced through educational policy discourse and practice in Chapter 8, specifically
Great Britain’s Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) Code of Prac-
tice 2015. By identifying these discursive dynamics, they hope to contribute to
disrupting their effects both challenging the limited conceptions of children’s
rights indicated in the SEND Code while also enhancing opportunities for chil-
dren’s participation in decision-making about issues that concern them.
In Chapter 9, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Meagan Montpetit examine
how children are presented Indigenous cosmologies in picture books that depict
more-than-human beings (such as plants, animals, etc.) through Western onto-
epistemologies. In doing so, these texts are framed through deficit discourses. To
14 C. P. Brown
counter and unsettle these colonial relations that frames Indigenous cosmologies
in negative light, they turn towards the work of Indigenous scholars and writers
to attend to the notion of more-than-human kinship in Indigenous cosmologies
found within children’s picture books.
By experimenting with a feminist common worlds method as a way of inter-
rupting the dominant human narratives of the developing gendered child, Mindy
Blaise and Tonya Rooney (Chapter 10) consider how gender stories, when retold
as natureculture gender stories, might open new directions in gender research.
They do so by first providing an overview of the ways in which gender stories in
early childhood have been told. Next, they address how learning how to listen to
and tell different gender stories is one way to challenge the binary logic of gender
identity. Then, Blaise and Rooney share natureculture gender stories from their a
multispecies walking ethnography of child-weather relations. Combined, these
efforts help them and the reader move beyond the binary logics of gender.
Finally, Dr. Nxumalo ends this text by picking up on the ideas these authors
put forward in their chapters and extends their work by examining possibilities
for ways forward for future directions that are oriented towards emancipatory,
strength-based understandings of children, families and early childhood educators.
Dr. Nxumalo does this by examining the possibilities within the kinds of educa-
tional shifts that she contends are needed amidst the interconnected persistence of
racial capitalism, settler colonialism and escalating environmental vulnerability.
In all, these chapters provide insight into how we might continue to work to
counter the policies, practices, and discourses that continue to frame children and
their families as lacking in some manner. Hopefully, these responses begin to
address Levin’s (1998) concern that “until we shift a major part of the focus on
failure to the need to transform entire schools, school districts, and state and
national educational systems to democratic entities that are designed for the suc-
cess of all participants, we ourselves fail to achieve much” in countering the logic
of gaps, deficits, and risks (p. 172). Thus, our hope is by having these ideas that
unpack the complexity of ECE in one place and offer varying ways forward that
we, as a field, can advance and promote new conversations, practices, and policies
that sustain, develop, and support the complexity of human beings we serve
throughout the field.
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2
DISMANTLING RACIALIZED
DISCOURSES IN EARLY CHILDHOOD
EDUCATION AND CARE
A Revolution towards Reframing the Field
Michelle Salazar Pérez
One of the most prevalent ways in which young children are minoritized is
through racialized discourses (MacNaughton & Davis, 2009). In the United
States and around the world, race has been used as a way to discriminate,
colonize, exoticize, and position individuals and entire communities as the
Other. The injustices that have manifested from racialized discourses are
countless, from denying people of color basic needs to limiting access to
equitable education. Within early childhood, children of color are dominantly
positioned as deficit and “lacking,” often being measured against a uni-
versalized White standard, whether through development, at-risk, or achieve-
ment gap narratives. To disrupt these narratives, the role racialized discourses
have played in shaping early childhood education and care must be
problematized.
In this chapter, I examine the social constructions of race and how racia-
lized, deficit-based discourses have become engrained in the field of early
childhood. I then discuss how we, as early childhood scholars and educators,
can disrupt and re-frame early childhood education and care as a perpetual
intervention project for racially minoritized children. Through this reframing,
early childhood moves towards a decolonial imaginary (Pérez, 1999). Bor-
rowing from Bhabha’s (1994) notion of time lag, Pérez (1999) contends that a
“time lag [exists] between the colonial and postcolonial” (p. 6), which she
frames as the decolonial imaginary, or “that interstitial space where differential
politics and social dilemmas are negotiated” (p. 6). In early childhood, the
decolonial imaginary opens a space to theorize with the wisdoms and
knowledges of the global south1, which in turn, can foster the empowerment
of young children of color.
Dismantling Racialized Discourses 21
The Coloniality of Race

Traced as an English term first used in the early 1500s (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin,
1998, as cited in Davis & MacNaughton, 2009), “race” was constructed as a social and
geopolitical category designed to advance colonialism, creating hierarchies to privilege
White, elite Europeans and subjugate people of color. Constructions of whiteness2
have been instrumental in forcibly erasing people of color globally in the name of
power and ethnic “cleansing” (Said, 1978). Religious doctrines have been used to
support such brutal acts, claiming that White colonizers were closer to God than
people of color (Gould, 1981; Davis & MacNaughton, 2009). Moreover, scientists like
Darwin provided a means to justify racial hierarchies, asserting that “it was an evolu-
tionary fact and necessity that stronger ‘races’ replace weaker ‘races’ and that European
‘races’ were superior to other ‘races’” (Davis & MacNaughton, 2009, p. 3). As such,
Darwin among others gave “biological justification” to falsely propagate the “intrinsic
inferiority” (Gould, 1981, p. 31) of people of color.
Coloniality (Mignolo, 2007; Minh-ha, 1989), through constructions of race, has
laid the foundation for horrendous acts globally, such as slavery and genocide. While
in the United States, enslavement is no longer legal, Leonardo (2013) reminds us that
Asian, Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples continue to experience different forms
of enslavement through unequal treatment, ghettoization, policing, and cultural
genocide. He explained:
The transparency of racial power is arguably more opaque in the era of

color-blindness or post-Civil Rights race relations. Unlike the overt forms of
White supremacy, the softened and coded/coated expressions, like normative
knowledge and unequal funding in schools, are either harder to transfix on
race or confounded by class issues. However, the resulting relationship is
consistent: White reigns supreme.
(Leonardo, 2013, p. 16)
Thus, racialized hierarchies have upheld white power and remain central to all facets
of life, including how we conceptualize early childhood education and care.
Racialized Discourses in Early Childhood Education and Care

Just as any term can be signified beyond a simple definition or classification, race can be
understood as a discourse. Citing Dick and Wirtz (2011), who suggest race is best situ-
ated not as “fixed categories of people and things, but processes by which people
become marked as exemplars of racial imaginaries” (pp. e3–e4), Urciuoli (2011)
explained:
Discourse is central to this process. That complicated mode of classification that

has come to be called race is real precisely because, and insofar as it is, a
22 M. Salazar Pérez
construction, a social fact. Real means real in people’s social experience, felt phy-
sically and psychologically, with consequences. Though routinely conceptualized
and acted upon as a thing, concrete and discrete, race— because it is a social fact—
is a continually emergent outcome of social production. That production of social
markedness takes place against a background of, in conjunction with, and in
opposition to, the production of whiteness.
(Urciuoli, 2011, p. e113)
Race, then, can be understood as a circulating discourse that has produced social and
institutional power for whiteness and the subjugation of Others. In early years edu-
cation, white power has advanced White male, global north theoretical perspectives.
Theories of the global north have shaped the White framing of childhood/s and the
deficit positioning of children of color through narratives of risk, developmental
delays, and achievement gaps. In the forthcoming, each of these aspects of early
childhood education and care are problematized.
White Washing Early Childhood Education and Care

Early childhood has been dominantly constructed through white patriarchy. One
can find in any foundations, history, or philosophy of early childhood textbook
the evidence of white, mostly male power subsuming the role of establishing the
field (see Follari, 2015; Gordon & Browne, 2017; Mooney, 2013). Friedrich
Frobel, for instance, is hailed as the founder of the first kindergarten. In Elkind’s
(2015) book, Giants in the Nursery, chapters include biographies about John Amos
Comenius, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson,
and Lev Vygotsky, among other White men from the global north, and Maria
Montessori. The author explained that being named a giant of early childhood is
based on three criteria, one of which is that a person must have:
A prominent and lasting place in the theory and practice of early childhood
education. Coming from different backgrounds and living in different times and
places, each Giant conceptualized the child and experiential learning from his or
her unique orientation … Thanks to these ideas, we have a more comprehen-
sive picture of the young learner than students at any other age level.
(Elkind, 2015, p. 4)
I, and those critical of “prominent” early childhood theorists (Bloch, 1991; Burman,
2008), argue that perhaps a wider net should be cast in the lensing of early childhood,
one that reaches beyond philosophies from White men who have historically been
epistemologically privileged through global north colonialism (De Sousa Santos, 2014).
Because those with racialized power have been the writers of early childhood his-
tory, the string of White men credited for founding the field is not surprising. It is hard
to accept, however, in our diverse and pluralistic world that no other ideas about
young children outside of White male epistemologies could be beneficial. Looking

beyond the global north would surely expand Elkind’s criteria of “coming from dif-
ferent backgrounds and living in different times and places.” There were undoubtedly
(and still are) multiple geopolitical and cultural spaces where perspectives about child-
hood/s have varied, more so than the “diversities” among White male theorists from
Europe and United States (Cajete, 2017; Ritchie, Skerrett, & Rau, 2014; Viruru,
2001). These perspectives, however, are not considered prominent nor from those
thought of as giants and therefore, have not been part of the dominant, White racia-
lized history of early childhood education and care.
When lecturing at an institution of higher education in Europe named after one of
the founding White fathers of early childhood, a faculty of color approached me after
my talk. She shared something compelling that reminded her about the white-
washing of field that I spoke about. In a recent early childhood text she was teaching
from, she said there was a version of the well-known proverb, it takes a village to
raise a child, which exists in multiple forms in several African languages. However,
acknowledgement for the proverb was written in the textbook as anonymous. She
shared how this is just one example of the complete erasure of the contributions of
people of color from the global south in shaping our understandings of childhood/s.
Mass globalization of White, global north philosophies in the conceptualization
of early childhood has resulted from constructing a history of the field based on
mainly White men, and as such, we must acknowledge how its meanings, pur-
poses, and practices have been whitewashed. No matter what the context, whe-
ther in early childhood spaces for children of color in the United States, or in
Mexico, Central America, or countries throughout the continent of Africa, the-
ories of the White global north have become the standard for “meaningful”
practices in early childhood education and care.
The White Standard for Childhood/s

The pervasiveness and influence of White male epistemologies in the field of
early childhood has framed how we think about childhood/s (Ryan & Greisha-
ber, 2005). From these theories, in the mid to late nineteenth century, develop-
mental psychology became the mainstay of studying childhood, with aims to
understand the adult psyche in its most infantile state. Burman suggested:
This enterprise was related to similar ventures in anthropology and animal

observation that were closely allied with European (and particularly British)
imperialism, maintaining the hierarchy of racial superiority that justified
colonial rule. The child of that time was equated with the “savage” or
“underdeveloped”; since both were seen as intellectually immature, “primi-
tives” and children were studied to illuminate necessary stages for subsequent
development.
(Burman, 2008, p. 15)
24 M. Salazar Pérez
As Burman and others have contended (Castañeda, 2002; Pacini-Ketchabaw,

2011), not all children were seen as able to develop or achieve full humanness.
Children/people of color were (and in many ways still are) relegated to remain in
perpetual development, as perennially savage. Constructing children of color as
savages, in which the Western White male had supposedly progressed beyond
and had become “intellectually superior” to through evolution, was tied to the
concept of child development and to a “wider model of social and economic
development … [which] in turn reinscribed the gendered and racialised privilege
of the cultural masculinity of the West as the normalised model of the nation
state” (Burman, 2008, p. 15). From these colonial and racist roots, developmental
psychology and child development was born and would architect the field of
early childhood.
White male scholars such as Piaget (and other “giants” of the field) have since been
instrumental in codifying universalized stages of development from which early child-
hood education and care has operated. Cannella and Viruru (2004) have critiqued the
notion of developmental progress as a colonial project, positing that it “constructs a
position in which someone (whether children, females, people of color, or adults
identified as primitive) is always judged to be lower—inferior—less worthy—at the
bottom” (p. 92). Because developmental norms have become standardized by White
scholars historically studying White, middle-class children (Bloch & Popkewitz, 2000),
racialized hierarchies have resulted, which have overwhelmingly positioned children of
color (and other minoritized children whether by language, class, gender, sexuality, or
ability diversity) as under developing and in need of intervention (Shallwani, 2010).
Bredekamp’s (1987) Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP), commis-
sioned by the National Association for the Education of Young Children
(NAEYC), has been instrumental in propagating developmentalism in the United
States and globally. Even in its revision (Bredekamp and Copple, 1997), which
attempted to address cultural responsiveness, Cannella (1997) argued that “the
statements and actions generated [by DAP] represent an extreme form of peda-
gogical determinism” (p. 131), privileging developmental psychology, creating a
universal child in which a single (e.g., developmental) approach can be pre-
scribed, and constructing DAP as “official knowledge” (p. 131). Notions of
quality in early childhood have similarly propagated universal norms from which
pedagogies have been designed and measured for developmental outcomes
(Dahlberg, Moss, & Pence, 2007). The dissemination and sustained prominence
of development and quality discourses globally is alarming, as it means that a
White/global north standard continues to shape how we think about childhood/
s, colonizing and potentially erasing the ways of knowing and being of children
and communities of color.
Yet, one must not assume that all early childhood educators and advocates are aware
of how racism and colonialism has shaped the construction of children of color in early
childhood education and care. There are many proponents of child development, for
instance, that truly have the best interest of young minoritized children at heart.
However, sometimes best intentions can unknowingly reify racism, colonialism, and
harmful conceptualizations of early education and care.
The Deficit Positioning of Children of Color: Early Childhood as

Intervention
The deficit positioning of children of color in early childhood education can be
traced through the genealogy of race and its colonial and White supremacist
roots. Deficits have manifested through discourses of underdevelopment, risk, and
achievement gaps, ultimately influencing how young children of color have
experienced early childhood education and care. In many ways, early education
has historically served the purpose of intervention for children of color. Programs
like Head Start, for example, were developed in the United States to address
poverty and have served a large number of children of color. Undoubtedly,
comprehensive early childhood programs are needed to safeguard the health,
education, and well-being of children and families experiencing poverty—cir-
cumstances that exist due to a history in the United States of systemic racism and
injustice (Collins, 2008; Gorski, 2018; Valencia & Solorzano, 2004). However,
while Head Start has had benefits, many have argued that it has missed the mark
of culturally and community centered educational praxis (Ellsworth & Ames,
1998; Souto-Manning, 2010). Instead, it has “educated” Head Start children and
families through deficit frameworks.
Intervention efforts by Head Start programs have led to mandating systems like
Teaching Strategies Gold (2018) which require teachers to document developmental
progress (or delays) with a computer assisted program (Kim, 2016). Teachers literally
check developmental markers hundreds of times for each child in their classrooms
throughout the course of a school year, which can amount to tracking the devel-
opment of over 30 children if a teacher has different classes in the morning and
afternoon. Subsequently, documentation for developmental progress or delays has
become central to teachers’ pedagogy and curriculum, and in turn, has adversely
impacted the experiences of minoritized children in Head Start.
Teaching Strategies Gold, along with other mandated observational instruments
that perpetuate the labeling of minoritized children as developmentally deficit, can
be found across early childhood contexts such as subsidized child care and publicly
funded pre-kindergarten, now available in the majority of states. Early childhood
programs have become tasked with getting “at-risk” children ready for public school
in order to prepare them for assessments in later grades, a consequence of policies like
No Child Left Behind (Brown, 2007), now the Every Student Succeeds Act, designed
to close a supposed achievement gap between White children and children of color
in K-12 education. Framing early childhood as a project to help “poor, at-risk”
children to be ready for standardized assessments in later grades or to meet develop-
mental markers (based on a White, middle class standard) legitimizes early childhood
education as an intervention project. If one pauses for a minute to reflect upon the
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some attention. He was brought up in the Church of England, and his earliest
recollection was of saying the Lord’s Prayer when his dinner was delayed.
[396] He planned at least one church and contributed to the erection of others,
gave freely to Bible Societies, and liberally to the support of the clergy. He
attended church with normal regularity, taking his prayer book to the
services and joining in the responses and prayers of the congregation. No
human being ever heard him utter a word of profanity. During the period of
his social ostracism by the intolerant partisans of Philadelphia, he passed
many evenings with Dr. Rush in conversation on religion.[397] ‘I am a
Christian,’ he once said, ‘in the only sense in which Jesus wished any one to
be—sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others.’ On one
occasion when a man of distinction expressed his disbelief in the truths of
the Bible, he said, ‘Then, sir, you have studied it to little purpose.’[398]
While the New England pulpits were ringing with denunciations of this
‘infidel’ and old ladies, unable to detect the false witness of the partisan
clergy, were solemnly hiding their Bibles to prevent their confiscation by the
‘atheist’ in the President’s House, he was spending his nights in the
codification of the ‘Morals of Jesus,’ and through the remainder of his life he
was to read from this every night before retiring.[399] In his last days he
spent much time reading the Greek dramatists and the Bible, dwelling in
conversation on the superiority of the moral system of Christ over all others.
In his dying hour, after taking leave of his family, he was heard to murmur,
‘Lord, now lettest Thy servant depart in peace.’[400]
The reason for the myth created against him is not far to seek. Just as the
landed aristocracy of Virginia pursued him with increasing venom because
of his land reforms, the clergy hated him for forcing the separation of
Church and State. When he made the fight for this reform, it was a crime not
to baptize a child into the Episcopal Church; a crime to bring a Quaker into
the colony; and, according to the law, a heretic could be burned. If the latter
law was not observed, that compelling all to pay tithes regardless of their
religious affiliations and opinions was rigidly enforced. This outraged
Jefferson’s love of liberty. The Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists, who
were making inroads on the membership of the Established Church, were
prosecuted, and their ministers were declared disturbers of the peace and
thrown into jail like common felons. Patrick Henry and his followers fought
Jefferson’s plan for a disestablishment—but he won.[401] The ‘atheist’ law,
which was never forgiven by the ministers of Virginia and Connecticut, was
simple and brief:
No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship,
place or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested or
burdened in his mind or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his
religious opinions or belief; but all men shall be free to profess, and by
argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and the same
shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.
Here we have the secret of the animus of the clergy of the time—but there
were other reasons. In his ‘Notes on Virginia’ he did not please the orthodox,
and Dr. Mason, a fashionable political minister of New York City, exposed
him in the pulpit, holding him up to scorn as a ‘profane philosopher’ and an
‘infidel.’ Discussing the theory that the marine shells found on the high
mountains were proof of the universal deluge, Jefferson had rejected it.
‘Aha,’ cried Mason, ‘he derides the Mosaic account’; he ‘sneers at the
Scriptures’ and with ‘malignant sarcasm.’ When Jefferson, referring to the
tillers of the soil, wrote that they were ‘the chosen people of God if ever He
had a chosen people,’ and referred to Christ as ‘good if ever man was,’ the
minister charged him with ‘profane babbling.’[402]
His view of creation is set forth in a letter discussing a work by
Whitehurst. He believed that a Supreme Being created the earth and its
inhabitants; that if He created both, He could have created both at once, or
created the earth and waited ages for it to get form itself before He created
man; but he believed that it was created in a state of fluidity and not in its
present solid form. This was his infidelity. He probably did not believe that
Jonah was swallowed by the whale—and that was enough to damn him. But
if he was not a Christian, the pulpits are teeming with atheists to-day.[403]
VI
We have seen that Hamilton had no faith in the Constitution, but did
yeoman service for its ratification; we have the charge that Jefferson was
hostile to both; and the truth is that he was hostile to neither and favorable to
both. The evidence is overwhelming.
When the new form of government was under consideration, he proposed
‘to make the States one in everything connected with foreign nations, and
several as to everything purely domestic,’ and to separate the executive,
legislative, and judicial branches.[404] He was bitterly hostile to any plan
based on the monarchical idea, and advised its friends ‘to read the fable of
the frogs who solicited Jupiter for a King.’[405] When the Convention met,
he wrote Adams that it was ‘really an assembly of demigods,’ but regretted
that they began their deliberations ‘by so abominable a precedent as that of
tying up the tongues of the members.’[406] His first impressions of the
completed document were unfavorable. In a letter to Adams he complained
of the reëligibility of the President.[407] To another correspondent he
complained that the proposed system would merge the States into one
without protecting the people with a bill of rights.[408]
Writing to Madison, he went more into detail, balancing the good against
the bad. He liked the separation of the departments, endorsed the lodging of
the power of initiating money bills with the representatives of the people,
and was ‘captivated with the compromise of the opposite claims of the great
and little States’; but he insisted that a bill of rights ‘is what the people are
entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what
no just government should refuse or rest in inference.’ Professing himself
‘no friend to a very energetic government’ as ‘always oppressive,’ he added
that should the people approve the Constitution in all its parts he should
‘concur in it cheerfully in hopes that they will amend it whenever they think
it works wrong.’[409]
Little more than a month later he had become an ardent friend of
ratification. ‘I wish with all my soul,’ he wrote, ‘that the nine first
Conventions may accept the Constitution, because this may secure to us the
good it contains, which I think great and important. But I equally wish that
the four latest Conventions, whichever they may be, may refuse to accede to
it till a declaration of rights is annexed.’[410]
When the Massachusetts Convention accepted with ‘perpetual
instructions to her Delegates to endeavor to secure reforms,’ he was
delighted,[411] and the same day he wrote another correspondent of his
pleasure at the progress made toward ratification. ‘Indeed I have presumed
that it would gain on the public mind as I confess it has on my own.’[412]
When South Carolina acted, he wrote E. Rutledge his congratulations. ‘Our
government wanted bracing,’ he said. ‘Still we must take care not to run
from one extreme to another; not to brace too high.’[413] When the requisite
nine States had ratified, he wrote Madison in a spirit of rejoicing. ‘It is a
good canvas on which some strokes only want retouching. What these are I
think are sufficiently manifested by the general voice from North to South
which calls for a bill of rights.’[414]
After the ratification, he wrote Madison in praise of ‘The Federalist,’
describing it as ‘the best commentary on government ever written,’ and
admitting that it had ‘rectified’ him on many points.[415] In the same vein he
wrote to Washington, expressing the hope that a bill of rights would be
speedily added.[416] In the spring of 1789 he wrote another that the
Constitution was ‘unquestionably the wisest ever yet presented to men.’[417]
And after the Bill of Rights had been added, he wrote to Lafayette that ‘the
opposition to the Constitution has almost totally disappeared’ and that ‘the
amendments proposed by Congress have brought over almost all’ of the
objectors.[418]
Years afterward, when he wrote his ‘Autobiography,’ he reviewed his
reactions on the document: ‘I received a copy early in November,’ he wrote,
‘and read and contemplated its provisions, with great satisfaction.... The
absence of express declarations, ensuring freedom of religious worship,
freedom of the press, freedom of the person under the uninterrupted
protection of the Habeas Corpus & trial by jury in civil as well as in criminal
cases excited my jealousy; and the reëligibility of the President for life I
quite disapproved. I expressed freely in letters to my friends, and most
particularly to Mr. Madison and General Washington, my approbations and
objections.’[419] His recollections were true to the facts as conclusively
shown in the correspondence to which reference has been made.
He was no more opposed to the Constitution and its ratification than he
was an atheist.
VII
This brings us to Jefferson the creator and leader of a party, and his
methods of management. Here he was without a peer in the mastery of men.
He intuitively knew men, and when bent upon it could usually bend them to
his will. He was a psychologist and could easily probe the minds and hearts
of those he met. In his understanding of mass psychology, he had no equal.
When a measure was passed or a policy adopted in Philadelphia, he knew
the reactions in the woods of Georgia without waiting for letters and papers.
This rare insight into the mass mind made him a brilliantly successful
propagandist. In every community he had his correspondents with whom he
communicated with reasonable regularity, doing more in this way to mould
and direct the policies of his party than could have been done in any other
way. Seldom has there lived a more tireless and voluminous letter-writer.
With all the powerful elements arrayed against him, he appreciated the
importance of the press as did few others. ‘I desired you in my last to send
me the newspapers, notwithstanding the expense,’ he wrote a friend from
Paris.[420] Believing that the people, in possession of the facts, would reach
reasonable conclusions, he considered newspapers a necessary engine of
democracy. ‘If left to me,’ he once wrote, ‘to decide whether we should have
a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I
should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.’[421] There is not a
scintilla of evidence to confute his stout contention that he never wrote for
the papers anonymously, but the evidence piles mountain high to prove that
he constantly inspired the tone of the party press.
In his personal contacts he was captivating—a master of diplomacy and
tact, born of his intuitive knowledge of men. Perhaps no better illustration of
his cleverness in analyzing men can be found than in his letter to Madison on
De Moustier, a newly appointed French Minister to the United States. ‘De
M. is remarkably communicative. With adroitness he may be pumped of
anything. His openness is from character, not affectation. An intimacy with
him may, on this account, be politically valuable.’[422]
In his leadership we find more of leading than of driving. He had a genius
for gently and imperceptibly insinuating his own views into the minds of
others and leaving them with the impression that they had conceived the
ideas and convinced Jefferson. To Madison this was a source of keen delight.
[423] Jefferson was the original ‘Easy Boss.’ His tact was proverbial. He
never sought to overshadow or overawe. Inferior men were not embarrassed
or depressed in his presence. He was amazingly thoughtful and considerate.
In a company he instinctively went to the assistance of the neglected. Thus at
a dinner party, a guest, long absent from the country, and unknown to the
diners, was left out of the conversation and ignored. In a momentary silence,
Jefferson turned to him. ‘To you, Mr. C., we are indebted for this benefit—’
he said, ‘no one deserves more the gratitude of his country.’ The other guests
were all attention. ‘Yes, sir, the upland rice which you sent from Algiers, and
which thus far succeeds, will, when generally adopted by the planters, prove
an inestimable blessing to our Southern States.’ After that the neglected
guest became the lion of the dinner.[424] Thoughtfulness in small things—
this entered not a little into Jefferson’s hold on his followers.
It was at the dinner table that he planned many of his battles. He did not
care for the stormy and contentious atmosphere of a caucus. He was not an
orator. In the Continental Congress he was disgusted by the ‘rage for
debate.’[425] Later he was to find his lot in the Cabinet intolerable because
he and Hamilton were constantly pitted against each other ‘like cocks in a
pit.’ He was not afraid of a fight, but the futility of angry controversy
repelled him. It was this which made him a delightful dinner host—all
controversial subjects that might offend were taboo. If his position were
warmly controverted, he changed the subject tactfully. It was never the
opposition that interested him, but the reason for it; and with rare subtlety he
would seek to obliterate the prejudice, if it were prejudice, or to remove the
misunderstanding if it were ignorance of facts. Thus he won many victories
through a seeming retreat.[426]
Unescapable quarrels and separations were minor tragedies to him. He
long sought to get along with Hamilton. He advised his daughters to be
tolerant of disagreeable people and acted on his own advice. Fiske has
explained him in a sentence: ‘He was in no wise lacking in moral courage,
but his sympathies were so broad and tender that he could not breathe freely
in an atmosphere of strife.’[427] Thus considerate of his foes, he never hurt
the sensibilities of his friends through offensive methods. He liked to gather
his lieutenants about him at the table and ‘talk it out’—each man free to give
his views. Here he ironed out differences, dominating by the superiority of
his intellect and fascinating personality while appearing singularly free from
domination.
In his power of self-control Jefferson had another advantage over his
leading political opponents. There was something uncanny in his capacity to
simulate ignorance of the hate that often encompassed him. To the most
virulent of his foes he was the pink of courtesy. He mastered others by
mastering himself. And because he was master of himself, he had another
advantage—he kept his judgment clear as to the capacity and character of his
opponents. One may search in vain through the letters of Hamilton for
expressions other than those of contemptuous belittlement of his political
foes. Jefferson never made that mistake. He conceded Hamilton’s ability and
admired it. Visitors at Monticello, manifesting surprise at finding busts by
Ceracchi of Hamilton and Jefferson, facing each other across the hall,
elicited the smiling comment—‘opposite in death as in life.’ There never
would have been a bust of Jefferson at ‘The Grange.’ Through the long years
of estrangement with Adams, Jefferson kept the way clear for the restoration
of their old relations. Writing Madison of Adams’s faults, he emphasized his
virtues and lovable qualities. When the bitter battles of their administrations
were in the past and a mutual friend wrote that the old man at Quincy had
said, ‘I always loved Jefferson and always shall,’ he said, ‘That is enough for
me,’ and set to work to revive the old friendship. Thus the time came when
in reply to Jefferson’s congratulations on the election of John Quincy Adams
in 1824, Adams wrote: ‘I call him our John because when you were at the
Cul de Sac at Paris, he appeared to me to be almost as much your boy as
mine.’[428] This capacity for keeping his judgment clear of the benumbing
fumes of prejudice concerning the qualities of his enemies was one of the
strong points of his leadership.
This does not mean that in practical politics Jefferson was a ‘Miss Nancy’
or a ‘Sister Sue.’ This first consummate practical politician of the Republic
did not consider it practical to underestimate the foe, nor to dissipate his
energy and cloud his judgment by mere prejudices and hates. He was not an
idealist in his methods, and this has given his enemies a peg on which to
hang the charge that he was dishonest. He was an opportunist, to be sure; he
never refused the half loaf he could get because of the whole loaf he could
not have. He trimmed his sails at times to save his craft—and this was
wisdom. He compromised at the call of necessity. He was hard-headed and
looked clear-eyed at the realities about him. He was cunning, for without
cunning he could not have overcome a foe so powerfully entrenched. He was
as elusive as a shadow, and this has been called cowardice—but it was
difficult to trap him in consequence. His antipathy to the frontal attack has
often been referred to with contempt, but, leading a large but unorganized
army against one of tremendous power, he preferred the methods of
Washington in the field—which was to avoid the frontal attack with his
ragged Continentals against the trained and disciplined army. Because of
these conditions he was given to mining. When apparently quiescent, he was
probably sowing discord among his foes—his part concealed. This was
hateful to the Federalists—just as the tactics of Frederick were hateful to the
exasperated superior forces against him.
Jefferson was the most resourceful politician of his time. For every
problem he had a solution. He teemed with ideas. These were his shock
troops. If he seemed motionless, it was because by a nod or look he had put
his forces on the march. Like the wiser of the modern bosses, he knew the
virtue of silence. When in doubt, he said nothing. When certain of his
course, he said nothing—to his foes. It was impossible to smoke him out
when he preferred to stay in. In the midst of abuse he was serene. And he
was a stickler for party regularity.[429] He appreciated the possibilities of
organization and discipline. When money was needed for party purposes, his
friends would receive a note: ‘I have put you down for so much.’ When the
party paper languished, he circulated subscription lists among his neighbors,
and instructed his friends to imitate his example. He was never too big for
the small essential things, and he was a master of detail—very rarely true of
men of large views. His energy was dynamic and he was tireless. He never
rested on his arms or went into winter quarters. His fight was endless. The
real secret of his triumph, however, is found in the reason given by one of
his biographers: ‘He enjoyed a political vision penetrating deeper down into
the inevitable movement of popular government, and farther forward into the
future of free institutions than was possessed by any other man in public life
in his day.’
VIII
No American of his time had such versatility or such diversified interests.

He was asked to frame the Declaration of Independence because of his
reputation as a writer. Adams has told the story: ‘He brought with him a
reputation for literary science and a happy talent for composition. Writings
of his were handed about[430] remarkable for their peculiar felicity of
expression.’ It was the ‘Summary View’ which elicited the admiration of
Edmund Burke. A more ambitious effort, his ‘Notes on Virginia’ were
written during the fatal illness of his wife, and while he was confined to the
house two or three weeks by a riding accident.[431] It was a valuable
contribution to the natural, social, economic, and political history of the
State, with a number of eloquent passages and fascinating pages.
He had an artistic temperament, loved music, and at the beginning of his
career we find him busy planning his garden at Monticello, and practicing
three hours a day on his loved violin, under the instructions of an Italian
musician. His hospitality to the Hessian prisoners is partly explained by a
mutual love of music. Returning from an absence to find ‘Shadwell,’ his
early home, in ashes, he inquired anxiously about his books. ‘Oh, my young
master,’ exclaimed the distressed slave, ‘they were all burnt, but we saved
your fiddle.’[432]
Loving art in all its forms, he was fond of the company of artists. It was
he who arranged in Paris for Houdon to go to America to make the statue of
Washington.[433] He entertained Trumbull in the French capital,
accompanying him to Versailles to see the King’s art collection, and urged
him to remain in Paris and study.[434] He was delighted with architectural
beauty and lingered about the masterpieces. From Nesmes, he wrote
enthusiastically to a woman friend: ‘Here I am, Madame, gazing whole
hours at the Maison Quarree, like a lover at his mistress. This is the second
time I have been in love since I left Paris. The first was with a Diana at the
Chateau de Laye-Epinaye in Beaujolais, a delicious morsel of sculpture, by
M. A. Soldtz. This you will say was in rule, to fall in love with a female
beauty; but with a house. No, Madame, it is not without a precedent in my
own history. While in Paris I was violently smitten with the Hotel de
Salm.’[435] When the Capitol at Richmond was in contemplation, he urged
the construction of the most beautiful edifice possible as a model to be
emulated in other buildings; drew some plans himself; examined those of
Hallet, was captivated with those of Thornton, and urged their acceptance.
‘Simple, noble, beautiful,’ he wrote home.[436]
And yet, so many-sided was this man, that he was a utilitarian and
scientist as well as artist. In Europe he was thought a philosopher, and
Humboldt came to America to pass many hours under his roof. A perusal of
his letters discloses the intensity and range of his interests. He was entranced
with clocks, and we find him writing David Rittenhouse reminding him of ‘a
kind promise of making me an accurate clock,’[437] and later to Madison of
a watch he had made for himself and inquiring if his friend wished one.[438]
He summoned a Swiss clock-maker to Monticello who died on the mountain
and is buried in the enclosure with his patron. He put the noted Buffon to
rout in Paris on points in natural history.[439] Admiring the red men, he spent
years collecting their vocabularies.[440] When in Paris he heard that an
Arabic translation of Livy had been found in Sicily, and importuned the
chargés des affaires of Naples to make inquiries, and was much excited to
hear that such a translation had been found ‘and will restore to us seventeen
of the lost books.’[441] In the midst of the political diversions and social
distractions of Paris he found time to write at length on the ‘latest
discoveries in astrology.’[442] As early as the summer of 1785, when Pilatre
de Rozière made his fatal attempt to cross the English Channel in a balloon,
we find him eagerly discussing the possibilities of the aeronautical science.
[443] A newly invented lamp pleased him and he sent one to a friend from
Paris.[444] The use of steam in the operation of grist mills interested him and
he found time to witness the test.[445] Even the absorbing drama of the
French Revolution in its early stages did not lessen his interest in Paine’s
iron bridge, and he attended its exhibition,[446] and finding the inventor
hesitating between ‘the catenary and portions of a circle,’ he sent to Italy for
a scientific work by the Abbe Mascheroni.[447] Fascinated by inventions, he
was, himself, the inventor of a plough.
IX
Interested as he was in art and inventions, his heart was with the country
life and the farmer’s lot. He was never happier than when, in the early
morning, mounted on one of his beloved horses, he rode over his broad acres
at Monticello, observing with a perennial zest the budding of the trees in
spring, the unfolding of the flowers, the ripening of the harvest. Wherever he
was, throughout his life, he longed for the house he had made on the hill, the
broad fields, the family circle and the servitors and slaves. There he was lord
of the domain. If he employed Italian gardeners, they conformed to his ideas.
If he had a supervisor, it was he himself who determined what should be
planted and where—where the orchards should be, what trees should be set
and their location; and even the vines and shrubs, the nuts and seeds, the
roots and bulbs claimed his personal attention. Even his hogs were named,
and when one was to be killed, he designated it by name.[448] There, too, he
lived in an atmosphere of affection. There he had taken his bride, a woman
of exquisite beauty, grace, and loveliness; there his children had been born,
and there, all too soon, their mother died. He was passionately devoted to her
and there was no successor. To the daughters who were left he became both
a father and a mother, resulting in an intimacy seldom found between father
and daughters. In Paris he would not permit even his trusted servant to do
their shopping, reserving that duty for himself. Always patient, never harsh,
and ever sympathetic, he was the ideal parent.[449]
Though he did not remarry, he was fond of the society of women and they
of his. The few letters to women that have been preserved are masterpieces
of their kind, sprightly, playful, sometimes beautiful. His relations with the
women of the Adams family are shown in a note to John Adams’s married
daughter, written from Paris: ‘Mr. Jefferson has the honor to present his
compliments to Mrs. Smith and to send her the two pair of corsets she
desired. He wishes they may be suitable, as Mrs. Smith omitted to send her
measure. Times are altered since Mademoiselle de Samson had the honor of
knowing her; should they be too small, however, she will be so good as to
lay them by a while. There are ebbs as well as flows in this world. When the
Mountain refused to go to Mahomet, he went to the Mountain.’[450] In Paris
he formed a few cherished friendships with women, notably with Mrs.
Cosway, Italian wife of an English painter, a woman of charm, beauty, and
intellect, with whom he corresponded. One of his letters, the dialogue
between the Head and the Heart on her departure for England, is unique and
sparkling.[451] He appreciated the exquisite Mrs. Bingham whom he met in
Paris, and his chiding letters to her after her return to America must have
pleased that artificial lady immensely.[452] He was a friend of the Comtesse
De Tesse whose mind he admired,[453] and of Madame De Corney whose
beauty attracted him. ‘The Bois de Boulogne invited you earnestly to retire
to its umbrage from the heats of the sad season,’ he wrote her gallantly. ‘I
was through it to-day as I am every day. Every tree charged me with this
invitation.’[454]
Such was Thomas Jefferson who took upon himself the organization of
the forces of democracy, when its enemies were in the saddle, booted and
spurred, and with a well-disciplined and powerful army at their back. None
but an extraordinary character could have dared hope for victory, and he was
that, and more. Democrat and aristocrat, and sometimes autocrat;
philosopher and politician; sentimentalist and utilitarian; artist, naturalist,
and scientist; thinker, dreamer, and doer; inventor and scholar; writer and
statesman, he enthralled his followers and fascinated while infuriating his
foes.
CHAPTER VI
THE SOCIAL BACKGROUND
‘I F New York wanted any revenge for the removal,’ wrote Mrs. Adams to
her daughter soon after reaching Philadelphia, ‘the citizens might be
glutted if they could come here, where every article has been almost
doubled in price, and where it is not possible for Congress and the
appendages to be half as well accommodated for a long time.’[455]
Reconciliation for the removal was not complete several months later when
Oliver Wolcott wrote his father complaining that ‘the manners of the people
are more reserved than in New York.’[456] Even so he had ‘seen nothing to
tempt [him] to idolatry,’ after having seen ‘many of their principal men,’ and
he had no apprehensions of ‘self-humiliating sensations’ after a closer
acquaintance.[457] It was not with unrestrained enthusiasm that the officials
took up their residence in the greater city, with its population of more than
60,000. ‘The Philadelphians,’ according to the indignant comment of
Jeremiah Smith, ‘are from the highest to the lowest, from the parson in his
black gown to the fille de joie or girl of pleasure, a set of beggars. You
cannot turn around without paying a dollar.’[458]
To the visitor entering by coach on Front Street and rumbling up to the
City Tavern the prospect did not seem so black as to those who received
their first impressions from the water-front. These beheld ‘nothing ... but
confused heaps of wooden store houses, crowded upon each other’—and,
behind the wharves, Water Street, narrow, shut in by the old bank of the
river, dirty, filthy, stinking.[459] Could he have looked down upon the city
from some convenient hill, he would have found something to revive his
drooping spirits in the compactness of the town and the substantial character
of the houses. The principal streets of the period were Front, Second, Third,
and Fourth, and beyond Sixth there were scarcely any habitations. No one
thought of building on Arch or Chestnut Streets west of Tenth, where the
land was thickly dotted with frogponds.[460] Practically all of business and
fashion was to be found east of Fourth Street, and the visitor or official
sojourner could congratulate himself on the ease with which he could get
about from place to place. An English tourist, observing that with the
exception of Broad and High Streets the thoroughfares were not more than
fifty feet in width, found them suggestive of ‘many of the smaller streets of
London except that the foot pavement on either side is of brick instead of
stone.’[461]
If the filth of the odorous water-front, the narrowness of the streets, and
the frogponds on the outskirts, so audible in the night, were depressing, the
houses, attractive, and in many instances architecturally pretentious, hinted
of comfort and solidity if not of opulence. The fact that almost all were
constructed of brick was not lost upon the travelers.[462] In the more
congested districts these houses had a shop on the first floor.
The streets, with their red-brick foot pavements and rows of trees, making
them fragrant after summer rains, and drearily murmurous in the winter
winds, were paved with pebbles in the middle,[463] with a gutter made of
brick or wood, and lined with strong posts to protect the area of the
pedestrians.[464] The trees, mostly buttonwood, willow, and Lombardy
poplars, had been brought over from Europe some years before by William
Hamilton.[465] At frequent intervals town pumps offered refreshment to the
thirsty, or, in the night, an accommodating hanging-post for the inebriate
staggering home from one of the popular taverns.[466] Not without its charm
was a walk through the streets of Philadelphia in the days when Hamilton
and Jefferson were exchanging shots, with the poplars and willows to shut
off the sun, the pumps to minister to the comfort, and with most of the
houses offering to the view a garden filled with old-fashioned flowers—
lilacs, roses, pinks, and tulips, morning-glories and snowballs with gourd
vines climbing over the porches. In the case of the more imposing mansions
there were more elaborate gardens with rare flowers and shrubbery, but in
many of these wealth claimed its privilege and shut off the view from the
common folk who could only catch the fragrance.[467]
The visitor on public business bent found all the governmental centers
close together. If interested in the debates at Congress Hall, erected for the
purpose at Sixth and Chestnut Streets next to the State House, the smallest
child could direct him. If a person of no special importance, he could find his
way into the commodious gallery of the House, and, looking down upon the
chamber, a hundred by sixty feet, with its three semi-circular rows of seats
facing the Speaker’s rostrum—‘a kind of pulpit near the center’[468]—could
find Ames busy at his circular writing-desk, Madison on his feet or
Sedgwick in conference with a lobbyist. If fortunate he might be admitted to
the space on the floor beneath the gallery. But it was not so easy to penetrate
to the more sacred precincts of the Senate on the floor above where the self-
constituted guardians of the covenant and the rights of property held
themselves aloof from the gaze of the vulgar. Perhaps, if he really prized the
privilege, he might look down from some point of vantage on the State
House Garden where the statesmen were wont to take the air and compose
their thoughts.
Did he have business with Jefferson? It was only a little way to the three-
story brick residence at High and Eighth Streets which had been taken over
for the purposes of the State Department. With Hamilton? It was but a few
steps to the old Pemberton mansion near Chestnut and Third, with its well-
cultivated garden in the rear where the indefatigable human dynamo worked
far into the night.[469] With the President? It was but a short distance from
Jefferson’s office to the Morris house.
At the time Washington moved in, the Morris house was one of the most
distinguished in the city, a dignified and impressive brick mansion, with two
large lamps in front, and with ample gardens to proclaim it the abode of a
personage of consequence. It was under its roof that Washington had lived as
the guest of Morris while presiding over the Constitutional Convention. It
was not without difficulties and annoyances that the house was taken over.
The banker was lustily praised by his friends for his sacrifice in abandoning
his home, but it appears to have been a sacrifice similar to that of managing
the finances of the Revolution. One writer questioned whether ‘giving up a
house of moderate dimensions for 700 pounds a year can be deemed a great
sacrifice ... when ... the President was accommodated in this city [New York]
with a much more elegant house at 400 pounds per annum.’[470] Even
Washington, who was Morris’s intimate friend, was distressed at the
difficulty in persuading him to fix the rental, and wrote Lear that he could
not understand the Senator. He would be willing to pay as much as he paid in
New York, and even more if there was not clear extortion. The owner finally
fixed the rental at three thousand dollars a year.[471] Thus Washington
moved in, and there the Presidents lived until the capital was moved to
Washington.
There, if properly presented, the visitor might call to receive the rather
cold, stately bow of Washington or even drink a cup of tea with Mrs.
Washington. In the case of a levee, he was sure to be welcome. But if his
social status did not suffice to justify the crossing of the threshold, he might,
if he were patient, see the great man as he drove forth in his ornately
decorated coach; or, better still, see him emerge on foot with his secretaries,
Lear and Jackson, one on either side, with cocked hats on their heads, the
aides a little in the rear. If he had the temerity to follow at a respectable
distance, he would have been surprised, perhaps, to find that the President
did not converse with his secretaries while on his walks.[472]
II
It was not joy unconfined to be interned in any of the hotels or taverns of

Philadelphia at any time while it was the capital. In the journals of tourists
who sojourned there we encounter no enthusiastic encomiums, even for
O’Eller’s, which owes something of its glamour in perspective to the fact
that the Assembly dances were held in its ballroom. It was infinitely better,
at any rate, than the Sign of the Sorrel Horse on Second Street, which comes
down to us as a ‘bad one.’[473] The City Tavern, scene of numerous political
demonstrations, concededly one of the best, would have been better rid of
vermin that infested the beds.[474] The London Tavern, which had its days as
the ‘principal hotel,’ was ‘deficient in comfort’ even at its best,[475] and the
Indian Queen distinguished itself as the scene of a doleful robbery when
some of Ames’s colleagues lost their linen, and thirty thousand dollars in
securities, and he escaped only because his name on his trunk assured the
‘partial rogues’ that ‘nothing was to be got by taking it away.’[476] In 1794,
the Golden Lion or the Yellow Cat at Eighth and Filbert Streets was a
favorite because of its well-drawn beer and porter; and the visitor, pushing
through the smoke-laden air to drink malt liquor from a pewter mug, would,
likely as not, find Governor Mifflin or General Knox of the Cabinet enjoying
their mugs along with the mechanics and clerks.[477] But it was not
necessary to sleep in the beds of the Yellow Cat to quaff its liquors, and after
a brief experience with the taverns the tourist would be likely to follow the
example of Thomas Twining and seek more comfortable and sanitary
quarters in some of the numerous rooming-houses that catered particularly to
members of Congress. The choicest of these resented the idea that they were
other than the private houses of gentlemen accommodating political
personages—this particularly true in the case of Francis, the Frenchman, at
whose house on Fourth Street, Vice-President Adams had a room.[478] In
these private rooming and boarding-houses, in which the majority of the
celebrities lived, an abundant table, clean agreeable rooms, and the
congenial companionship of colleagues made an appeal. At Francis’s the
head of the table was reserved for Adams, and all the ceremonial forms were
scrupulously observed, although he frequently had his meals served in his
rooms. It was not until he had escaped from the Indian Queen and found
lodgings ‘at the house of Mrs. Sage’ that Ames began ‘to feel settled and at
home.’[479] This hiving had its comedies, sometimes its scandals, and
occasionally its romances, as on the day Senator Aaron Burr took James
Madison to call upon the winsome daughter of his landlady, and history was
made in the candlelit parlor of the boarding-house.
Quiet and home-like, at least, these boarding-houses of our early
statesmen, and if they had no bars, they were in close proximity to many that
were of good repute. The members of the Legislature sometimes were
known to discuss important measures at Geisse’s Tavern over the mugs,[480]
were wont, on adjournment, to linger at Mr. O’Eller’s for his incomparable
punch,[481] and to celebrate the ending of a session with an evening of
conviviality at ‘Mr. Burns tavern on Tenth Street.’[482] Gentlemen riding
along the banks of the Schuylkill could seldom resist the impulse to
dismount at the tavern of Metz—for these drinking-houses were kindly
placed among a people intolerant of puritanism.[483]
Going forth into the streets to mingle with the common people was a
revelation to the polished tourist from the old lands. Here they found nothing
of the humility of the lowly to which they were accustomed. The mechanics
and common laborers took the theory of equality seriously. One traveler
found ‘the lower sort of people’ lacking in good manners[484] and observed
that a well-dressed stranger, asking a polite question, was almost certain of
an impudent answer.[485] These were the men who were to man the societies
fashioned after those of the Parisian radicals, to rally passionately to the
support of the French Revolution, and to supply Jefferson with his shock
troops—and sometimes shocking troops—in his fight for the
democratization of the Republic.
These, too, in their desperate striving for equality were moved to
imitations of the spendthrift practices of the rich. Even the servants and the
negroes gave elaborate balls which Liancourt found ‘destitute of the
charming simplicity of the fêtes of our peasants.’[486] The women appeared
in dresses beyond their means; the laborer and his lady rode in coaches to the
dance, where an elaborate supper was served, with liquid refreshments.
Sundays found the public-houses of the environs packed with the men of the
factories and shop, borne thither, with their families, in chairs. There was
much drinking and spending with gambling on the fights arranged for their
delectation.[487] At Harrowgate Gardens, two miles out on the New York
road, and Gray’s Gardens on the Schuylkill, they flocked to drink tea or
liquor, to dance, promenade, or flirt, and on summer nights the young men of
all stations were lured to them by the promise of romance. Even the grave
and reverend statesmen could not, in all cases, resist the call. Gay and
wicked some must have thought the scene—with the painted women of the
town a bit brazen in their fishing for men. ‘We have Eves in plenty, of all
nations, tongues and colors,’ wrote Oliver Wolcott to his wife from Gray’s
Gardens where he had taken refuge from the yellow fever, ‘but do not be
jealous—I have not seen one yet whom I have thought pretty’—leaving her
to imagine the possibilities should one such appear.[488] And yet, pleasure-
loving as the population was, the nights were reasonably quiet. About the
time the city assumed the dignity of a capital, there was little to disturb the
tranquillity of the night after ten o’clock beyond the voice of the watchman,
or the footsteps of some night-hawk wending his way by the light of the
street-lamps ‘placed like those in London.’[489] But five years later, a visitor
who recalled that in 1794 it was unusual to meet any one at night, or to hear
any noises after eleven o’clock, found that the nocturnal annoyances
continued far later into the night.[490]
It was by day, however, that the city made its best impression. The
luxury-loving people, the wealth and extravagance of the social leaders
insisting upon London and Parisian styles, the commercial traditions of the
community gave to its shopping district an elegance found nowhere else in
America. The houses of the importers and wholesalers, some maintaining
their own ships, were found, for the most part, on Front and Water Streets.
When in the spring and autumn the ships came in, and the great boxes of
English dry-goods were stretched along the pavement of Front between Arch
and Walnut Streets to be opened, it was a thrilling event to the
Philadelphians. Fluttering about them were the retail merchants—for most of
these in the days of the city’s political preëminence were women—
exclaiming ecstatically over the contents. Soon the goods were transferred to
the shops, which even a Frenchman found ‘remarkable for their
neatness’[491]—due, no doubt, to the sex of the proprietors. What more
fascinating than to stand before the great show windows—something new—
at Mrs. Whiteside’s fancy dress-goods shop, with exquisite cloths and
dresses hung full length and festooned to best advantage after the manner of
Bond Street, London. Did it add anything to the appeal to know that the
proprietress had come from London? Alas, no doubt. Thither the ladies from
the mansions drove in their carriages to make their purchases, and thence,
perhaps, for something more, to the South Second Street store of the smiling
Mrs. Holland, and then on, perchance, to Mrs. Jane Taylor’s at the Sign of
the Golden Lamb.[492] And then, having ministered to the materialistic
yearnings of vanity, as like as not milady directs the coachman to stop at
Bell’s British Book Shop on Third Street, near Pearl, lest the lord and
master, in placing his order with his London agent, overlooked something
she would not miss.
An easy, patrician life for some of these Philadelphians, but not for all.
The workman receiving a dollar a day and board, and with the smallest
houses on the outskirts renting for three hundred dollars a year, found it far
from a frolic to make both ends meet. The middle-class employees of the
stores and industries, paying from eight to twelve dollars a week for board,
without wine, candles, or fire, could have found little to interest them in Mrs.
Whiteside’s show windows, for, while the clerks were courteous and the
merchant polite, the cost of her goods was far in excess of that on Bond
Street.[493] But it is not with these of the more humble order that we are
concerned just now. It is quite possible that the curious Jefferson, who had a
habit of prying into the living conditions of ‘people of no importance,’ may
have wondered how these lived, but the social environment of the majority
of the statesmen was far removed from the common people. It is with the
world of fashion that we are concerned.
III
No society in America could have been less in harmony with the spirit of
democracy, for nowhere was class consciousness and caste pride more
pronounced. ‘Those who constitute the fashionable world are at best a mere
oligarchy, composed of a few natives and as many foreigners,’ wrote Otis to
his wife.[494] ‘I might have believed myself in an English town,’ said
Viscount de Chateaubriand.[495] An Englishman noted that ‘amongst the
upper circles ... pride, haughtiness, and ostentation are conspicuous; and it
seems that nothing could make them happier than that an order of nobility
should be established, by which they might be exalted above their fellow
citizens, as much as they are in their own conceit.’[496] A French nobleman
could not escape the observation that ‘the English influence prevails in the
first circles and prevails with great intolerance.[497] And Otis, who liked the
tone himself, was much impressed with the discovery that ‘the women after
presentations to the court of George III or Louis XVI transplanted into
Philadelphia society the manners of the English aristocracy and the fashions
of Paris.’[498] During the days of the British occupation, the cream of society
had reveled with the British officers, and many of these had resumed their
places in the society of the republican capital without abandoning their
former views. This English tone was to be felt by Jefferson a little later when
his sympathy with the French Revolution was to enter into his policies. From
the beginning these pro-English aristocrats were to draw political lines in
social intercourse, and in time Otis was to record that ‘Democratic
gentlemen and their families, no matter how high their social qualifications,
were rigidly ostracised by the best society.’[499] Along with this went a
rather vulgar deification of the dollar, and, strangely enough, a lack of polite
hospitality to the stranger. ‘What is justly called society,’ wrote Liancourt
whose ideas had been fashioned at Versailles, ‘does not exist in this city. The
vanity of wealth is common enough.’ The picture he paints is not a pretty
one. It shows a flamboyant rich man flauntingly displaying ‘his splendid
furniture, his fine English glass, and exquisite china,’ to the stranger invited
to come to ‘one ceremonious dinner,’ and then dismissing him for another
who had not ‘seen the magnificence of the house, nor tasted the old
Madeira.’ This, we are told, was the routine for all who came from Europe
—‘philosophers, priests, literati, princes, dentists, wits and idiots.’ But alas,
‘the next day the lionized stranger is not known in the street except he be
wealthy.’[500] However much they may have fallen short in manners, they
yielded nothing to Versailles in dress. This ‘elegance of dress’ astonished
Chateaubriand, and Liancourt was amazed at ‘the profusion and luxury’ in
‘the dresses of their wives and daughters.’ At balls, ‘the variety and richness
of the dresses did not suffer in comparison with Europe.’ The brilliant note
was assiduously sought in costumes, and there was much copying of the
subjects of Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds. One foreigner noting the
‘immense expense on their toilet and head dress’ thought it ‘too affected to
be pleasing.’[501] But by common consent these grand dames and belles
were beautiful, with their sparkling eyes, graceful forms, and the brilliancy
of their complexions.
If this aristocracy was neglectful of the stranger who had no golden key
to its interest, it was not because of a dearth of entertaining. Here there was a
hectic activity—dinners, dances, breakfasts, teas, parties enough to satisfy
the most insatiate passion for such excitement. Throughout the season the
great houses were ablaze with light, and if, as Mrs. Adams complained, there
was much the same company in all, it was congenial company, and the
intimacy of the contact allowed a familiarity that sometimes verged on the
risqué. In less than a month after her arrival, Mrs. Adams was appalled at
‘the invitations to tea and cards in the European style,’[502] and was
complaining that she ‘should spend a very dissipated winter if [she] were to
accept one half the invitations, particularly to the touts or teas and cards with
even Saturday night ... not excepted.’[503] A little later Aaron Burr was
being swamped with ‘many attentions and civilities—many invitations to
dine, etc.’[504] If Burr declined, as he wrote his wife, the handsome young
Otis, who loved the company of women, was not so coy. ‘I have dined once
with Cuttling at Mrs. Grattan’s,’ he wrote home, ‘once at Yznardi’s
[Spaniard who spent much time in Philadelphia] in great stile; and yesterday
in the country with Jonathan Williams [nephew of Franklin]. I am engaged
for next Christmas with Mrs. Powell, but with nobody for the Christmas
after next.’[505]
At these functions—heavy drinking—flirting—risqué talk. Even a
German was shocked to find that at public dinners each person would often
consume six bottles of Madeira.[506] Only Burr was hard to satisfy. ‘I
despair of getting genuine Trent wine in this city,’ he wrote Theodosia.
‘There never was a bottle of real unadulterated Trent imported here for sale.
Mr. Jefferson, who had some for his own use, has left town.’[507] But if there
was no Trent, Madeira flowed in streams, beer and ale, punch and whiskey
and champagne could be had for the asking, and there was asking enough,
even at parties and dinners. Even Hamilton, who drank with moderation,

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