This paper reviews some of the social, historical, and political forces and events that influenced the development of Bennett Reimer's early philosophy of music education in the late 1950s and continuing to his death in 2013. John Dewey's ideas about the moral and political purposes of art education are employed as critical tools for understanding the political dynamics of Reimer's career during the early Cold War as all education was conceived by government and prominent education reformers as social control rather than liberation.