The aim was to drive all private schools in the state out of business

Sunday, March 5th, 2023

In 1922, Oregon passed a law requiring every child to attend a local public school:

Supporters including the KKK admitted the aim was to drive all private schools in the state out of business. But before the law went into effect, the U.S. Supreme Court deemed it unconstitutional.

Undeterred, the Klan continued pursuing its education agenda in the public sphere. Members bullied Catholic teachers and principals into vacating public school jobs. They made donations of (Protestant) Bibles and agitated for mandatory (Protestant) prayer and religion classes. And they lined up behind the National Education Association (NEA), the country’s largest teachers union, as it lobbied over more than a decade for the establishment of a federal Department of Education.

The groups wanted an Education Department that would provide funding to schools across the country, thereby promoting literacy and patriotism. An influx of immigrants had raised concerns that pockets of the country were not being assimilated into the American way of life. Compulsory education was meant to build national unity, ensuring the country’s future workers could speak the same language and preparing them to be productive members of society.

Supporters of this effort often portrayed it as a grand humanitarian crusade. “We must have a compulsory education system to reach and uplift every future citizen,” national Ku Klux Klan leader Hiram Evans said in 1924. If the campaign was successful, “all our humanity might live in harmony.”

The cruelly coercive nature of the proposals nevertheless was apparent. “We will be a homogeneous people,” Evans told a friendly audience in 1923. “We will grind out Americans like meat out of a grinder.” Or as an early Progressive education reformer chillingly put it in 1902, “The nation has a right to demand intelligence and virtue of every citizen, and to obtain these by force if necessary.”

As the NEA and KKK pushed to federalize education funding, they met opposition from Catholic institutions. The National Catholic Welfare Council, a U.S. body of Catholic bishops and staff, worked diligently to oppose bills that would have elevated an Interior Department bureau collecting education statistics into its own cabinet agency. America, a Jesuit magazine, editorialized against the legislative proposals as well. Fearing that federal funding of education would lead to federal control of education, Catholic leaders argued that parents must be allowed to determine what kind of schooling was right for their kids.

History was on the Catholics’ side. Education in America had always been a state and local issue. Although the Founders “wanted a nation of virtuous, informed citizens,” wrote Kevin Kosar, then of the R Street Institute, in 2015, “almost nobody saw educating them as the federal government’s job. The Constitution didn’t authorize the federal government to make schools policy.”

In the 1920s and ’30s, opponents were successful at preventing the establishment of a standalone cabinet agency. But the push for a centralized education authority didn’t go away even when the Klan did. Lawmakers in Washington began appropriating school funding in the decades that followed, and a federal Department of Education was officially created in 1979.

Comments

  1. Ezra says:

    Although the Founders “wanted a nation of virtuous, informed citizens,” … “almost nobody saw educating them as the federal government’s job. The Constitution didn’t authorize the federal government to make schools policy.”

    That was the case with much in American life in 1787. Decisions so many issues best left to the states. Federal government left as small and as possible. One size does not fit all.

  2. Jim says:

    Who else knew that the KKK was a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant organization? I surely didn’t; it certainly paints things in a new light. And how amusing that White Anglo-Saxon Protestants thought themselves able to “assimilate” the Ellis Island continent. Not a generation later, the shoe was on the other foot, and hasn’t come off since.

  3. VXXC says:

    The KKK was a Democratic organization and like the NEA could do as they liked until they couldn’t.

    1965: Jim Snow [replace n----- with wigger] pays better in all respects than Jim Crow [Blacks on bottom]. There’s more whites, they’re very law abiding, they had a lot more money and still do.

    Not to mention it looted and burned out the ‘white ethnics’ aka Catholics from their prosperous urban enclaves. As a side benefit of slash and burn Civil Rights [blacks being themselves] very valuable urban real estate was opened to long term development, cracked out as we say. Taxpayers finance the entire ride. This is how fortunes were made from gentrification and will be again now that we did it again in 2020.

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