Oregon Compulsory Education Act

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, millions of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe poured into the United States for economic and social opportunities, many of whom were poor peasants of Catholic and Jewish faith.

Since the U.S. was predominantly a Protestant society at the time, many saw these new immigrants as a threat: criminals, competitors for jobs and housing, and adhering to faiths supposedly incompatible with American values.

In 1920, sociologist John Daniels said of the public schools: “[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 dozen years or more… [They] emerge, looking, talking, thinking, and behaving generally like full-fledged Americans.” For Protestants, public schools seemed like the great American melting pot, teaching “Pure Americanism” to new immigrants and assimilating them into Protestant culture.

[3] With support including the state Ku Klux Klan and 1922 Democratic gubernatorial candidate Walter M. Pierce, the law was passed by a referendum vote of 115,506 to 103,685.

In 1929, Pope Pius XI explicitly referenced this Supreme Court case in his encyclical Divini illius magistri[5] on Catholic education:The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.