The Most Interesting Woman o[ Europe," ran the title of a feature story in the New. York Tribune late in 1918. The Literary Digest picked up the story and used it for its own comment on December 20th of that same year, four clays after Dr. Montessori set sail for Liverpool, ending a month's successful stay in the United States. On both occasions the person behind the headline was a brilliant, forceful, persuasive Italian physician and social scientist, Dr. Maria Montessori, who was making headlines with a visit to this country.
Dr. Montessori's triumphal lecture tour took her through much of the country, and seemed a happy climax to three years of steadily mounting enthusiasm for her theories of education by way of training of the senses through exercise with "didactic materials." Irt fact, a year's time, spanning a part of both 1912 and 1918, gained for Dr. Montessori genuine acclaim in the United States and, oddly, proved to be the last in which "the Montessori method" received serious attention by more than a handful of original supporters. Her American fame was truly meteoric, lasting from 1909 to 1915. William H. Kilpatrick added significantly to the extinction of Dr. Montessorfs public and professional appeal in the United States.
Throughout most of 1918 Dr. Montessori enjoyed a press noteworthy; for its acclaim but no less so than the journals. Current Opnion 1 ran a fine photograph, front view, ,of the handsome Dottoressa and captioned the picture: "Hailed as Greater than Froebel and Pestalozzi." The columns that ran beneath the portrait carried the title: "What America Thinks of Montessori's Educational Crusade," a title that caught the spirit of Dr. Montessori's American tour. It was a crusade, though perhaps, less in the mind of Montessori, than in the minds of her American devotees. And the response of those who came to listen to Montessori was %urprisingly sympathetic" in contrast with the