Cross Purposes: Pierce v. Society of Sisters and the Struggle over Compulsory Public Education

INTRODUCTION. One Flag, One School

INTRODUCTION One Flag, One School The message tacked to the St. Mary’s Academy door just before midnight on November 7, 1922, con‹rmed the worst fears of the nuns and schoolchildren asleep within. “The School Bill passed. Fiat!” Hours earlier, the people of Oregon became the ‹rst in the nation to approve a ballot initiative compelling public education for all children between the ages of 8 and 16. The law made criminals of parents or guardians who sent their children to private schools. The oldest Catholic school in the state, St. Mary’s Academy had educated Portland children since 1859; now it faced certain closure. A late-night rain splattered the rows of darkened windows across the ivy-covered facade of the school at the corner of Fourth Street and Mill. The massive brick and stone building already looked deserted. The passage of the School Bill ordained the ruin of both secular and religious private schools throughout the state. Of Oregon’s 175,000 students, 12,000 attended private schools. More than three-quarters of these privately educated students attended schools operated by the Roman Catholic Church. Opponents of the School Bill, pointing to such statistics, charged that it was the product of anti-Catholic bigotry. It was not that simple. The Oregon School Bill emerged from the nativist furor sweeping the United States. Between 1901 and 1920, over 14 million immigrants came to America, the large majority of them from southern and eastern Europe, most of them Catholics and Jews. The Great War heightened hostility to- ward foreigners and to ideas perceived as anti-American. Victory did not alleviate this antipathy. As Americans struggled to “return to normalcy,”many argued that immigrants who spoke different languages and practiced different religions were destabilizing the country and threatening the American way of life. The country’s preoccupation with nativism, patriotism, and ideological conformity reached its apex with the Red Scare of 1919–20. Headlines warned of Bolshevik “terrorists” who plotted to bring violence and revolution to America.1 Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his young assistant , J. Edgar Hoover, led a campaign to deport thousands of immigrant members of the Communist Party. The crusade to purge America of Bolshevist in›uence spread throughout all facets of society. One British journalist observed, “No one who was in the United States . . . in the autumn of 1919, will forget the feverish conditions of the public mind at that time. It was hag-ridden by the ghost of Bolshevism. . . . Property was in an agony of fear, and the horrid name ‘Radical’ covered the most innocent departure from conventional thought with a suspicion of desperate purpose.”2 Radicalism also preoccupied the Supreme Court, which, like the nation, struggled to adapt to a world of vast and rapid change. The spate of wartime legislation restricting radical speech forced the Court to decide how far the government could go to suppress subversive in›uences. Like the rest of the country, the Court took a hard line on radicalism. Under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, it upheld convictions of immigrants, antiwar activists, and socialists for subversive speech. In case after case, the Supreme Court af‹rmed lengthy prison sentences for speech critical of the government and the war. Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate for president through ‹ve elections, was among those whose antiwar speeches yielded ten-year prison terms. The postwar Bolshevik hysteria fueled intolerance toward immigrants. The Bolshevist label was code for all things considered unAmerican. Patriotic societies argued that the “best antidote for Bolshevism is Americanism .” For many Americans, the drive to assimilate immigrants became a patriotic mission to protect national security. The call for compulsory public schooling grew out of this crusade to Americanize immigrants. Compulsory public schooling offered a potent means of acculturation, training impressionable children to become loyal Americans. In 1920, sociologist John Daniels proclaimed the virtues of public education: “[Children] go into the kindergarten as little Poles or Italians or Finns, babbling in the tongues of their parents, and at the end of half a 2 cross purposes dozen years or more . . . [they] emerge, looking, talking, thinking, and behaving generally like full-›edged Americans.”3 The public school, then, was to be the great American melting pot. The Ku Klux Klan supported compulsory public education as part of its political agenda. Reconstituted in Atlanta in 1915 as the Invisible Empire and energized by the national success of the racist...