Much discussion and agitation attended the Lusk laws after their passage and in the attempts at their enforcement, for many believed that the right of free speech was endangered by such measures. In 1923, under considerable pressure, the legislature revoked the statute, and Governor Alfred E. Smith affixed his signature to the repeal.
Laws similar to the statutes passed by New York are found in Ohio, Michigan, West Virginia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Nebraska, South Dakota, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, and Washington. In 1919, Michigan, Nebraska, Tennessee, Montana, and Washington enacted statutes requiring that all teachers of the public schools must be citizens of the United States, and Idaho retained upon her statute books a law of 1897 which had the same intent. The same action was taken by North Dakota in 1921. In addition to those engaged as instructors in the public schools, Nebraska included teachers in private and parochial institutions. In Washington, California and Michigan the privilege of a license was granted to those aliens who declared their intention of becoming citizens, and in Washington, there were added to the proscribed group, those teachers whose certificates or diplomas had been revoked on account of a failure to impress upon the minds of the pupils “the principles of patriotism or to train them up to a true comprehension of the rights, duty, and dignity of American citizenship.”[282]
An open declaration of loyalty and of an intention to inculcate patriotism in their pupils was required of all teachers by Ohio in a law of 1919, by Colorado, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, and South Dakota in 1921. Ohio, Colorado, Oklahoma, Arizona, and South Dakota made it incumbent upon teachers not only in the public schools, but in private and parochial schools, to take an oath to support the constitution of the state and of the United States and to obey their laws. Ohio insisted upon an “undivided allegiance to the government of one country, the United States of America,” and Colorado and Oregon sanctioned the same form.[283] Nevada required of teachers the oath in her constitution, prescribed for all public officers.[284] In Oklahoma, any teacher violating the law, or any person or officer paying out any school funds to a person teaching without subscribing to the oath, was deemed guilty of a misdemeanor. Upon conviction such a person was penalized by a fine of not less than one hundred or more than five hundred dollars, or imprisonment in the county jail from sixty days to six months, or both.[285] Oregon, upon conviction, prescribed a maximum fine of one hundred dollars for non-enforcement of the law.
In West Virginia, a law of 1923 has enjoined upon all teachers, at the time of signing a yearly contract, an oath to support the constitution of the United States and West Virginia.[286]
In addition to the regulations imposing an oath of allegiance on teachers, South Dakota, like Washington, in her law included a prohibition of treasonable utterances. “Any teacher,” the law declared, “who shall have publicly reviled, ridiculed or otherwise spoken or acted with disrespect and contumacy towards the flag of the United States or its official uniforms or insignia, or towards the system of government of the United States, and its Constitution, or shall refuse to take and subscribe to the oath of allegiance hereinbefore required, shall thereafter forever be disqualified to teach in any public or private school within this state, and the certificate of any such teacher shall be revoked by the superintendent of public instruction upon satisfactory proof of the commission of any such offense.”[287]
An Oklahoma statute has excluded from all public and private schools of that state persons “guilty of teaching or inculcating disloyalty to the United States or of publicly reviling the flag, or the system of government of the United States.” Yet the statute prescribed that “criticism of any public official shall not be construed as within the purview” of this regulation. California, in a bill relating to American histories and other textbooks which passed the Assembly in 1923, would have leashed her teachers in much the same way. But the bill failed of passage in the Senate.[288]
The appropriation bill passed by the Sixty-Eighth Congress for the District of Columbia, in 1925, provided that no money should be available “for the payment of the salary of any superintendent, assistant superintendent, director of intermediate instruction, or supervising principal who permits the teaching of partisan politics, disrespect for the Holy Bible or that ours is an inferior form of government.” A similar provision relates to teachers.[289]
Two states, on the other hand, have passed laws emphasizing a faith in the integrity and patriotism of their teachers. Although their action preceded the legislation of the World War, yet it is significant that there have been no restrictive laws since then in these commonwealths. In 1911, Pennsylvania sanctioned a policy of freedom of thought for her teachers by declaring that “no religious or political test or qualification” should be required of “any director, visitor, superintendent, teacher, or other official, appointee, or employee, in the public schools of this commonwealth.”[290] In 1913, the General Court of Massachusetts forbade any school committee, by rule, regulation or other means to restrain or penalize any teacher for “exercising his right of suffrage, the signing of nomination papers, and the petitioning or appearing before committees of the legislature”; but it permitted school committees to forbid a teacher to exercise any of the aforesaid rights, suffrage excepted, on school premises during school hours or where the exercise interfered with the performance of school duties.[291] Of great significance was the Massachusetts law of March 17, 1917, which expressly prohibited inquiries relative to the religious or political belief of applicants for positions in the public schools and forbade the rejection or selection of the applicant on such grounds.[292]
Many commonwealths, however, like New Jersey, have enacted laws pertinent to teachers as citizens, but not openly and avowedly “teacher” legislation. Such a law was approved February 13, 1918, by the governor of New Jersey. It provided that “any person who shall advocate, in public or private, by speech, writing, printing, or by any other means, the subversion or destruction by force of the government of the United States, or of the State of New Jersey, or attempt by speech, writing, printing, or in any other way whatsoever to incite or abet, promote or encourage hostility or opposition to the government of the United States, or of the State of New Jersey, shall be guilty of a high misdemeanor, and on conviction shall be punished by imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years, or by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars, or by both fine and imprisonment, in the discretion of the court.”[293]
Of all legislation dealing with the teaching craft, that which has attempted to control and direct the speech of the teacher has provoked the greatest protest. Our political development has been such that an interference with the free expression of opinion creates the impression that a jealously guarded right has been invaded. It is this feeling which has led to an agitation against such laws, although the fear that a teacher may be an instrument for corrupting his pupils is not a product of recent times either in this country or in world history.[294]