You Wouldn’t Know It Today, But Religious Zealots Used to Love American Public Schools

A humorous and most likely satirical Minion meme went around a few years ago showing two images: the top one was a Minion appearing happy in front of an American flag with a gold cross over it and the caption was: “Your Child (age 6) before public education”. Below it was a depiction of a gruff-looking Minion, sporting a mustache, with a cigarette hanging out of its mouth, wearing a ushanka, with the Soviet Union’s flag in the background and the caption read: “Your Child (age 7) after 1 year of public education”. The joke here was clearly to poke fun at how religious zealots in America today, such as then Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, generally dislike public education because a religious education is not included as it would violate the First Amendment and the unions of public schools often donate money to the Democratic Party, so hyperbolic parents might therefore try to argue that they are thus teaching communism to children at said schools. While the meme was almost certainly made by a secular supporter of public schools, who was mocking their perceived extremist religious and conservative beliefs, as well as their incontestably insufferable love of Minions memes, it is because of the slight possibility that the meme was not satire that the following should be pointed out: religious zealots in America once loved public schools and fought tooth and nail against private schools, particularly in the State of Oregon.

In 1922, the State of Oregon was very much like what we might think of the Deep South as being like today: devoutly Protestant, anti-immigration, unabashedly racist (as shown with it being illegal for African Americans to live in the state until 1926), obsessed with American nationalism and making sure that children were raised to be, in their view at least, sufficiently patriotic, and even containing a not insignificant Ku Klux Klan population. Even though that wave of immigration had been occurring since the 1880s, this was still a concern because it was before the Immigration Act of 1924 was signed and no one knew when the perceived horror of non-Protestants entering the country would end. It was worried that the immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, who, though then only a fraction of the state’s population, could still find their war to the Pacific Northwest, and potentially might not assimilate into the Protestant lifestyle that America was ostensibly founded on. In 1920, 13% of Oregon’s population of 814,000 were immigrants, only 8% of the population as a whole was Roman Catholic, and only 7% of schoolchildren in the state attended private schools. So, despite Catholics, immigrants, and private school attendees being minute compared to Oregon’s population as a whole, the fact that three-quarters of private schools in the state were run by the Catholic Church was enough to prompt the Masonic Grand Lodge of Oregon to call for a referendum on whether or not all school-age children should be mandated to attend public schools. With the support of the Democratic gubernatorial candidate and soon-to-be Governor of Oregon, Walter M. Pierce, as well as the state’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan, the Compulsory Education Law referendum was approved by 52.7% of voters, with 115,506 in favor 103,685 opposed.

In a bout of democracy going wrong to a degree rivalling what happened to Socrates, the Oregon School Law, officially known as the Compulsory Education Act, went into effect and by September 1, 1926, Catholics, as well as parents of attendees of other private and military schools would have to face the consequences. If they had a child between the ages of eight and sixteen, they would have no choice but to place them in a public school, where they would receive what was perceived to be a proper, “Americanizing”, Protestant education. Not surprisingly, this major assault on the freedom of parents provoked a backlash, not just locally, but nationally, as Catholics across the country felt under attack by a law forbidding their religion from being taught and that had received support from the unabashedly anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan. By March of 1925, this law was being challenged in the United States Supreme Court in the case of Pierce v. Society of Sisters. The law was unanimously declared to be unconstitutional for violating the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The civil liberties guaranteed by that amendment were deemed to have been trampled on the by the voters of Oregon, as a parent deciding where their child was educated was ruled a civil liberty. The mood of the court was succinctly summarized by Associate Justice James Clark McReynolds, when he wrote that “the child is not the mere creature of the state”. The scheme of religious zealots was never able to come to pass.

So, what is to be made of this today? Well, most evidently, it shows that advocates of religious education have not always been the scheming followers of Milton Friedman, who just want to funnel public money to for-profit schools to enrich their friends and set the stage for a theocratic, Christian nationalist free market vision of America, or however public school supporters might frame these Betsy DeVos types. At the same time, it shows that public school supporters today could be negatively associated with the Oregon Compulsory Education Law and they may find themselves in a guilt-by-association situation. It would most likely be Catholics doing this today, as Protestants would likely be embarrassed by their ancestors supporting public schools, as well as the suspect organizations that supported the law. Ultimately, it shows that support of the state ebbs and flows among certain groups when the special interests it is supporting changes.