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

CHAPTER 2. We the People

CHAPTER 2 We the People A small group of Oregon Masons, spurred by the statewide focus on compulsory public education during the primary, mobilized to place an initiative on the Oregon ballot in the November general election. Judge John B. Cleland , a Mason and Past Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Oregon, drafted the initiative. The measure required public schooling for all children between the ages of 8 and 16, except for those physically or mentally “abnormal .” Parents or guardians who violated the law were guilty of a misdemeanor and subject to a ‹ne up to $100, 30 days in jail, or both. There were fourteen sponsors of the initiative, all prominent Masons. Robert E. Smith, president of the Lumberman’s Trust Company in Portland, spearheaded the initiative campaign. In a well-coordinated strategy, the Masons quietly circulated initiative petitions among its lodges and other Protestant patriotic organizations at 8:00 a.m. on Thursday, June 15. Signature collection ceased at 5:00 p.m. Smith claimed the collection of 50,000 signatures during that nine-hour period . The actual number of signatures collected appeared closer to 29,000, with 13,000 of those eventually rejected by the secretary of state, leaving 16,000 signatures, well beyond the 13,000 required by the state to place the initiative on the November 7 ballot. The Masons ‹led the initiative with the secretary of state on July 6. Smith boasted that the Oregon measure would be a model for the rest of the country. 15 The Forces behind the School Bill On July 4, two days before the ‹ling of the School Bill initiative, Father Edwin V. O’Hara, superintendent of Catholic schools in Oregon, staked out the Catholic position on the debate about to unfold. In an address to students at a summer session of the Marylhurst Normal School, Father O’Hara attacked compelled public education as an unjusti‹ed interference with parental rights. His speech, widely distributed in a pamphlet entitled Freedom of Education, argued that parents maintain the primary right and obligation of educating their children and that the state has the right to interfere only when parents fail to ful‹ll their duty. In the absence of parental neglect , he explained, the state must defer to parental choice: “these rights of parents are primitive and inalienable and may not be violated by the state without injustice; . . . the rights of parents to educate their children . . . is the most inamissible [sic] of human rights.” O’Hara concluded that a state that fails to respect parental rights violates basic American principles: “the exercise by the state of its police power to drag children from the home of parents who are capable and willing to perform their full duty in the education of their children, would be an importation of tyrannous principles heretofore foreign to American tradition.”1 The editor of the Oregon Voter, writing immediately after the secretary of state certi‹ed the School Bill for the ballot, concluded that anti-Catholic animus drove the proposal: “It is as an amendment to the Compulsory Education Law that this initiative bill comes before the public, although it is aimed at Catholic parochial schools.”2 School Bill sponsor Philip S. Malcolm released a public denial to the charge: “The attention of the Masonic Bodies of Oregon has been directed to statements that the compulsory public school bill is being initiated for religious purposes. Nothing is further from the real truth.”3 The question of whether the Masons fronted the School Bill for the Klan bears inquiry. Of the fourteen sponsors, at least two were Klan of‹cials. Malcolm, the Oregon inspector general of the Masons and the primary individual sponsor of the School Bill, openly aligned himself with the Klan. The Masonic endorsement of the proposal occurred at a special meeting of selected Masons called by Malcolm and Fred Gifford, also a Mason, in the spring of 1922. The secrecy of Klan membership ‹les leaves the extent to which the Oregon Klan in‹ltrated the Masons a matter of conjecture. The Klan’s na16 cross purposes tional platform included a proposal for compulsory public education and a pledge to protect America from the threat of “Bolshevist” and “Roman” in›uence in the private schools. The Capital Journal newspaper charged, in an editorial entitled “Masonry the Goat,” that the Klan allied with the Masons to stimulate Klan membership. The Journal probably...