The Department of Education Battle, 1918-1932: Public Schools, Catholic Schools, and the Social Order (review)

One of the primary reasons for establishing the National Catholic Welfare Council in 1919 was to give the Catholic Church a national organization comparable to the Protestant Federal Council of Churches. However, as Douglas J. Slawson demonstrates, during the first decade of its existence, the main rival to the NCWC was not the Federal Council of Churches, but the National Education Association. At issue was the attempt of the NEA to lobby for the establishment of a federal Department of Education and federal aid to education, both of which were opposed by Catholic educators. Beginning in 1919 with the Smith-Towner Bill, the NEA and its allies worked hard to secure congressional approval for these initiatives, but abandoned the attempt in 1932. The adroit lobbying tactics of the NCWC was a major reason for their failure.

Catholic opposition was rooted in the fear that a federal Department of Education would lead to a "Prussianization" of American education and that federal aid to public schools would price most private and Catholic schools out of the market. Catholic suspicion was intensified by the fact that two of the most prominent organizations to support a Department of Education were the Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite Masons and the Ku Klux Klan, whose ultimate purpose was to outlaw all private elementary and secondary education, as they tried to do in Oregon in 1922.

Catholics were not alone in their opposition. The educational establishment itself was divided, especially over federal aid to education, fearful that federal money would lead to federal control of education. Moreover, the proposed legislation offended the principle of states rights and local control of education. Most significant of all perhaps was that the Republican administrations that controlled the federal government from 1921 to 1932 were all committed to trimming the federal budget and showed no enthusiasm for additional educational expenditures.

Douglas J. Slawson has mined the archives of the NCWC to provide a detailed account of the way that the U.S. bishops responded to what they perceived as a major threat to Catholic education. The staff of the NCWC combined educational professionalism with shrewd political maneuvering to defend Catholic interests. They consistently deflected the efforts of the Masons and the Klan to make opposition an exclusively Catholic issue by successfully seeking common ground with non-Catholic allies. Likewise, they made it difficult to depict Catholics as opponents of public education by offering to support compromise solutions, such as an expanded role for the Office of Education in the Department of the Interior. The NCWC staffers did some of their most crucial lobbying not on Capitol Hill but at the national conventions of both parties. In 1924 they were so successful at the Democratic convention that Edward Pace and James Hugh Ryan actually wrote the educational plank adopted by the convention.

One of the most valuable aspects of Slawson's study is his delineation of the forces promoting a federal Department of Education and the motivation for their action. In addition to the educational establishment spearheaded by the NEA, he traces it to the Progressivism that surfaced in American politics at the beginning of the twentieth century, in particular the populism of the farm-belt South, Midwest, and West with its sense of exploitation by the urban East and Midwest. Throughout the 1920's political support for a Department of Education came largely from farm-bloc senators and congressmen of both parties, who looked to federal aid as a means of redressing the educational imbalance between rural and urban America.

The conflict over the Department of Education also revealed a deeper gap in American society in the xenophobic 1920's. For "one-hundred-percent" Americans only the public school could be trusted to inculcate authentic American values in the children of immigrants and hyphenated Americans. For Catholics freedom of education was one of the...