Catholics and Education: Background Information

Education and Americanization

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Democracies seem fragile even to their strongest supporters. If the people can choose their rulers, how can we be sure they will make the right choices, that they will not select con men and charlatans to govern them? Even some of the founding fathers worried that the "people" might dissolve into an unthinking mob, wreaking havoc on a fragile government. For many Americans the only way to ensure that people make wise political choices is to make the people themselves wise. Children must go to school to learn the nation's ideals and duties as well as the rights and privileges of being a citizen. But what kinds of ideals should be taught to young people, and who should teach them? If America is comprised of an ethnically and religiously diverse people with differing ideas about national values, whose notions of those values should be imparted to children?

Americans have argued over the meanings of a public education since the public school movement first gained momentum in the early nineteenth century. In recent years those conflicts have focused on whether students of different ethnic backgrounds should study together, what history students should learn or what languages teachers should use in their classrooms. Yet the most enduring and bitterest of school controversies have been those involving the place of religion in schools: prayers in school, bible reading, and the possible conflicts between religious and scientific explanations of the universe.

Another area of conflict on the education front involves private schooling. When the notion of public funding for education was still new in early nineteenth century America, citizens were not sure whether governments should create their own public schools or provide funds for existing private schools that met proper and agreed upon standards. In many other countries, such as England, Ireland, and Canada, the government supports private, even religious, schools that meet certain criteria.

Catholics sought the same support early in the nation's history. In 1840s New York, Bishop John Hughes demanded public funding for his diocese's parochial schools. At other times, priests and bishops from Lowell, Massachusetts to Poughkeepsie, New York to Faribault, Minnesota tried to work with public schools to provide religious education to students through "released time" arrangements. Anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant nativists not only opposed such arrangements they sometimes even questioned the very existence of parochial schools. They believed such schools nourished foreign and un-American, customs and values and prevented children from finding their way into the American mainstream. In the 1880s, Massachusetts legislators considered a bill to permit the state to closely monitor private schools and in Illinois and Wisconsin state legislatures passed laws to limit the use of foreign languages in parochial schools.

In times of stress or rapid social change, schools become the focus of fears and centers of controversy, for many have come to believe that through the schools people can be taught to do right and order can be maintained. The Antebellum controversies over bible reading in the schools erupted amid a rising tide of immigration, the birth pangs of a new industrial economy and growing sectional tensions over slavery. Laws to control private schools passed in the 1880s and 1890s when worries about labor strife and fears of new kinds of immigrants from Southern Europe or Japan were rampant. Though the origins of the Oregon School bill extend far back into American history, its immediate beginnings lie in World War I. Mobilization for the War tipped over into hysterical loyalty crusades in many American communities. A poll of 1200 school systems in March of 1918 found that one seventh, nearly 200, had removed German language study from their public school curricula.

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Several states, including Delaware, Montana, and Iowa, also banned the teaching of German in their schools. Americans worried not only about German Americans or vestiges of the culture of the German enemy; they suspected all foreigners of disloyalty and thought all foreign languages or cultures were potential threats to American culture. Factories, social settlements, public and private schools all created programs to convert recent Italian, Polish, Slovak and other immigrants into "100% Americans". As the National Americanization Committee suggested: "Let us insist frankly that a man born on another soil has to prove himself for America."

Catholic Church leaders in America were just as eager as any others to prove their loyalty to the United States. The bishops of the United States formed the National Catholic War Council in 1917 to coordinate and encourage Catholic participation in the War. The Council set up Catholic settlement houses in cities across the country to Americanize immigrants and urged every diocese and Catholic organization to set up their own Americanization programs.

Once unleashed by the War, the fear of disloyal foreigners took on a life of its own. In the midst of a postwar depression and a series of major strikes, government agencies began cracking down on foreigners as suspected radicals. State legislatures, still flush with the nationalist emotions of the war and fearful of the new economic upheaval, lost faith in private voluntary Americanization activities and turned to the schools to make "100% Americans" out of Italian, Polish, or Slovak immigrants and their children. By 1919, two states required non English speaking aliens to attend Americanization classes. In the same year, fifteen states passed laws insisting that all instruction in primary schools must be in English.

These school laws were only one battle in the cultural war emerging during the "Tribal Twenties." Congress would severely restrict immigration, virtually excluding immigrants from Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and other parts of eastern Europe. Meanwhile the Ku Klux Klan, reborn on Stone Mountain in Georgia in 1915, grew to over 3 million members by 1924. The new Klan was much more popular in the north and concerned about immigrants and Catholics than the old Klan of the Reconstruction era. In fact, the new Klan's stronghold was not any southern state, but Indiana.

The Fight For Public Schools in Oregon

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In 1920, less than 13% of the people of Oregon were immigrants, and probably less than 8% of the population were Catholics, and yet Oregon became a hotbed of anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment after the War. Within two years of the end of World War I, the Oregon legislature voted to prevent non-citizens from owning land. This measure was aimed principally at Japanese and Chinese immigrants, who could not become citizens, but also disqualified Italians, Poles, Jews and other foreigners who were slow to Americanize. In the same year Oregon required all foreign language magazines to print English translations of articles, imposing added costs that would ruin most foreign language periodicals. In Oregon, as in most parts of the United States, schools soon became a focal point of the "100% American" crusade. In 1921, for example, the Oregon legislature began considering bills requiring teachers to take oaths of loyalty to the United States.

By that time the Ku Klux Klan had already appeared in Oregon. King Kleagle Luther I. Powell was from Shreveport, Louisiana but moved to California and then to Oregon in 1921 to spread the Klan gospel. By 1923, the Klan counted fifty-eight chartered "Klaverns" around the state and over 15,000 members in Portland alone. The Klan had a broad program. It claimed, for example, to stand for old time notions of morality. In LaGrange, Oregon the local Klavern turned away applicants of "questionable character and affiliations" and in cities and towns around the state the Klan actively backed enforcement of Prohibition laws and strict codes of sexual behavior. Yet the Klan's chief concern was preserving white, Protestant dominance in America from the challenges poised by foreign immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and African-, Asian- or Latino-Americans, or, as the leader of Oregon's Klan, Fred Gifford, called them, these "mongrel hordes."

For Klansmen, like many nativists, public education was the best, indeed, the critical, means of Americanizing "Un-American" foreigners. The public school, Oregon nativists claimed, was the "only sure foundation for the perpetuation of and preservation of our free institutions." Yet in the frenzy of post-war hysteria about foreigners, Oregon's Klansmen and their allies were not just concerned about whether public schools would do their duty, they began to worry about the potentially subversive poisons spread by private especially, Catholic, schools. A Klan sympathizer from Glendale, Oregon worried that "private ideas antagonistic to free institutions" might flourish in private schools and no one could prevent them from infecting the children educated there. " We cannot afford to run this risk any longer," he contended.

It was not just any ideas that the Klansmen feared; it was Catholic ideas that they deemed most dangerous. The Klan first sought to purge the public schools of any Catholic influences by eliminating Catholic teachers and principals. It "is not a question of Catholic's [sic] having the right to follow the teaching of their Dago Pope," said one nativist, "but the right of Protestants to educate their children by the best school system in the world." In LaGrange and Eugene, Oregon local Klan Klaverns mounted campaigns to push Catholic teachers out of the schools. In Eugene, they succeeded in pressuring the School Board to fire three Catholics.

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In 1922 the Klan turned to the second goal in its strategy for purifying Oregon: eliminating Catholic schools. To do so, the Klan worked through a front organization, the Scottish Rite Masons, to make all of Oregon's children aged eight to sixteen years old attend only public schools. They labeled the bill simply and deceptively, "The Compulsory Education Law." Rather than try to push such a controversial bill through the legislature, the Klan and its allies decided to submit their bill directly in a ballot Initiative. This was possible because Oregon was the first state in the nation to adopt the Initiative and Referendum, hallmarks of reform in the Progressive era. These two reforms permitted citizens to circumvent the legislature and pass laws themselves through their votes in general elections.

Hailed as a triumph over boss and party rule, the "Oregon System" of Initiative and Referendum won widespread notoriety for providing opportunities for "Direct Democracy." Exploiting this legacy of progressive reform to advance their own cause of racial and religious purity in the tribal twenties, the Klan and Scottish Rite Masons launched a well organized statewide campaign for their Compulsory Education bill. Brimming with confidence, the Klan also managed to nominate one of its own, Walter Pierce, as the Democratic Party's candidate for Governor in the same autumn elections.

Oregon's Catholics did not sit idly by and watch the Klan eliminate their schools. They organized a Catholic Civil Rights Association and enlisted the help of Lutherans and other religious groups, who ran their own schools. Catholics also set up committees in every parish in the state to rally voters against the Initiative and distributed 50,000 copies of a pamphlet, "Twenty Four Reasons," condemning the bill. Catholics and their allies in Michigan had easily beaten back a similar initiative. Yet Catholics were less numerous and powerful in Oregon than in Michigan and by the summer of 1922 - months before the Initiative vote - they were running out of money. Though the Catholic counterattack lost momentum by the fall, most observers believed that the Initiative would fail. The editors of the Oregonian, the state's biggest newspaper, gave 10 to 7 odds against it. They were wrong. On November 1922, 115,506 citizens of Oregon went to the polls and voted for the Initiative; 103,685 voted against it. The Initiative never mentioned private schools, but because it required all elementary and secondary school age children in Oregon to attend public schools, it effectively eliminated all private and parochial schools in the state. Catholic education was dead in Oregon; it had been outlawed by the government.

The NCWC Supports Oregon Catholics

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Oregon's Catholics and their allies decided to carry on the fight in the courts, but they needed help to do that. They looked to the National Catholic Welfare Conference for that help. Located in Washington, D.C., the Welfare Conference had evolved out of the National Catholic War Council. The Welfare Conference's founders were convinced that Catholics from dioceses all across the country still needed an organization to mobilize their power and speak with a single voice on issues of national import even after the war had ended. Some Catholics both in Rome and the United States were skeptical. The Vatican had fought battles with the French and other nations for centuries over attempts to create national versions of the church and did not now want an "American church" making claims for its own, special, national privileges. Some American bishops were also wary of a national organization trying to tell them how to run their dioceses or claiming to speak for them to the Pope. Bishops in Michigan had even refused the NCWC's help in their successful fight against the Klan. Yet the Archbishop of Portland, Oregon, Alexander Christie, had fewer resources and confronted a more powerful enemy. He needed the NCWC is he were going to keep the state's Catholic schools in business.

The Oregon School Case proved to be an important turning point in the NCWC's history. After taking on the case in January of 1923, the Welfare Conference began raising money - $60,000 by September of 1923; created a National Catholic School Defense League; and, with a blizzard of press releases and pamphlets, launched, what historian Thomas Shelley has called, "probably the most extensive, the most professional, and the best conducted" public relations and press campaign "ever attempted by the Catholic Church in America up to that time." The Council also hired William Guthrie, a distinguished New York lawyer often mentioned as a candidate for the Supreme Court, to join with the Portland Archdiocese's lawyer, J.P. Kavanagh, to argue the case. The NCWC's performance in this fight quieted its critics and helped prove the organization's contention that the Church in America needed a national office to defend and advance its interests.

On December 22, 1923, lawyers working for the Archbishop of Portland asked for an injunction against the Compulsory School law on behalf of the Society of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, an order of Catholic Women Religious, who ran several schools in Oregon. They did not argue for the injunction on the basis of the First Amendment, the right to freedom of religion. Rather, they argued on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment that the Compulsory School Law would force private schools to close and thus deprive their owners, like the Sisters of the Holy Names, of their property without due process.

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In January of 1924, a three-judge panel (see photo above) heard the case and on March 31, 1924 granted an injunction against the State of Oregon ordering it not to implement the law. The state appealed the case to the Supreme Court. In June of 1923, the Supreme Court had struck down Nebraska's bill prohibiting private elementary schools from teaching foreign languages. In March of 1925, the Court heard the Oregon case of Pierce vs Society of Sisters and on June 1, 1925, overturned the Oregon school law.

Since that decision the Court has heard many cases concerning the government's relations with parochial schools. In 1930, it up held a Louisiana law permitting the state government to supply textbooks to private schools, arguing that such support advanced a public good. In 1947, the Court approved the right of a state or city government to pay for buses to transport children to private schools. The Court, however, refused to sanction "released time" schemes that would permit public school children to attend religious instruction under church auspices in their schools during school time. Some people, including the former President of Harvard, James B. Conant, would continue argue as supporters of the Oregon School Law had that all children should attend public schools for, at least, some of their school years to ensure the nation's democratic unity. Never again, however, would a state challenge the right of private schools to exist, and never again would the Supreme Court retreat from its defense of that right.