Napoleon did give Europe an efficient civil code. Mussolini did make the trains run on time. Hitler did revive the German economy, and genuinely liked dogs. In the spirit of giving even the worst devils their due, let’s hunt for something nice to say about the Ku Klux Klan.
Last week in Oregon, Democrats pressed for repeal of a perfectly sensible law enacted in 1923, at the behest of the Ku Klux Klan at a time when the Klan dominated state politics. The law is simple and understandable: public school teachers are not allowed to wear religious clothing in their classrooms. Introducing the legislation last fall, House Speaker Dave Hunt said it would “allow teachers to have the same religious free exercise rights as every other Oregonian.” At a hearing on the bill last week Hunt held up a picture of a Klansman who had legally changed his name to “Kasper K. Kubili” before becoming his predecessor as Speaker of the House, and urged the committee “To send a strong message that Speaker Kasper K. Kubili and the KKK members of the era were wrong.”
I’m not so sure they had this one wrong. Teachers do not and should not have the same rights to free expression that other Oregonians have, at least while they are in the classroom. Wearing sexually suggestive clothing on the street is one thing; in the classroom, it is another. Wearing a political campaign button or T-shirt on the street is one thing; in the classroom, it is another. Teachers are role models; they are dictators; they can and should have enormous influence over impressionable young minds. I routinely wear F.C. Barcelona gear to my youth soccer team’s practices, and I am tickled to be raising a new crop of American fans for The Greatest Soccer Team In The World. Soccer is a game; religion is not.
The 1923 Oregon law was a companion piece to an even more controversial measure backed by the Klan, which required all Oregonians between the ages of eight and sixteen to attend public schools – i.e., not Catholic schools. This law was later deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, on the same ground as it had ruled just a few years earlier that states could not regulate the number of hours employers could force their employees to work without paying them overtime.
What the Oregon law did not do was punish anyone for holding Catholic beliefs, attending Catholic services, or brainwashing their children that non-Catholics deserve to go straight to hell. Even though the 1920s Klan was overwhelmingly Protestant – two-thirds of its paid organizers were ordained Protestant ministers – the law did not require, or even permit, the encouragement of Protestantism in the schools. Even though the Klan was as anti-Semitic as it was anti-black, the law did not encourage the disparagement of Jews in classrooms – as Catholic teaching of the time did. The law simply recognized the value of providing the children of Oregon with a common grounding in the things they needed to know to become productive citizens. Everyone was treated exactly the same.
The Catholic schools this law displaced operated quite differently from the public schools. They were not run by locally elected officials, in accordance with the wishes of the electorate; they were run by, and for the aggrandizement of, a foreign government.
Ostensibly, state governments were authorized to regulate Catholic schools to assure that educational standards were being met. In practice, such regulation was almost universally non-existent – rare was the state bureaucrat willing to risk being condemned as an anti-Catholic bigot. A National Education Association report in 1928 concluded that “In general, it may be said that supervision is conspicuous by its absence rather than its presence.” In the 1940s, only four states in the union required the same level of teacher training for Catholic school teachers as for public school teachers. Catholic schools didn’t even adhere to their own standards: only 5 of 65 Catholic communities of teaching nuns surveyed in 1932 held strictly to their training requirements before sending out young nuns into their schools.
As important as the quality of the teaching was the substance of what was being taught. Erase from your mind the picture of a Catholic school as essentially the same as a public school, with 30 minutes of Lives of the Saints thrown in. The Church insisted that every “subject taught be permeated with Christian piety” – even a first-grade arithmetic book taught children to count by using pictures of priests, altars, and angels. The reason for being for the whole system was to prevent Catholic assimilation into the broader society, to program Catholic children into believing they were different from (and better than) everyone else, so they would grow into dutiful financial and political supporters of the Catholic bureaucracy. The Church banned the teaching of evolution while stressing the sinfulness of separating of Church and state. Archbishop John T. McNicholas, general president of the National Catholic Educational Association, put it: “There must be no wall of separation, between God and the child. The secularistic educators who raise this wall are, in reality, fascist educators, who, perhaps without realizing it, are planning to give our country millions of uncontrolled juvenile criminals.”
Even Protestant authors were suspect: Brother George N. Shuster of St. Louis attacked the “domination of literature courses … by English Protestant classics” in an address to 1,100 Catholic teachers. “Protestant literature,” he said, “should be relegated to the periphery – since we need some sort of roughage in our diet, as children occasionally need a dose of sulphur and molasses. Better to disinherit its students from Oscar Wilde and Byron than to disinherit them from the Catholic classics. Literature taught now is insular, decadent, a literature based on ignorance and negation of the Catholic way of life. The real question for Catholic teachers to ask themselves is: Do we want to form a Catholic mind or not?”
The Klan and the Oregon legislature wanted the state’s schools to form minds, not Catholic minds. The Supreme Court blocked that. The companion law, against wearing religious garb in a classroom, was enacted because in hundreds of school systems across the United States where Catholics had the votes to control electoral outcomes, they essentially took over the public schools. Humanists, Protestants, Mormons, and Jews were paying taxes to support “public” schools that were staffed by nuns in full costume, salaries paid by the government. The Church gave strict orders to Catholic teachers in public schools, lay and religious alike: they “must not speak in such wise as to give the impression that all forms of religious belief possess a natural right to exist and to propagate. Only the true religion possesses such a natural right.” The State Superintendent of Education of Michigan discovered in 1946 that a number of parochial schools had been operating illegally in nineteen districts, in some cases for twenty-five years, while receiving money from the taxpayers as though they were public schools. More than 2,000 students had been attending these schools, and in some districts there was no other kind of “public” school. “The schoolrooms,” according to the Superintendent, “were adorned with statues, icons, and pictures that particularly depicted the Catholic faith. It was found that the textbooks and other reading materials used were those having the approval of the Catholic order.”
Germany today (and for most of its history, other than a tragic interlude in the early 20th century) is one of the most liberal, tolerant societies in the world. It gets that way in part by having a simple law requiring all children to attend school. Attending a Catholic or other denominational school is ok, but some schooling outside the home is necessary. Earlier this year a family of Christian zealots from Germany actually succeeded in being awarded political asylum in the United States, because they wanted to defy this law and keep their children at home to avoid the contamination of associating with non-Christians at a public school. Women forced into arranged Muslim marriages can’t get asylum here, but these anti-social Germans can. Where’s the Klan when we need them?
That’s all the fairness I can stand for one day. Now I can settle back into reviling the Klan for the other 99% of the things it stood for.
