The last four words of this section, innocent and reasonable as they look to the average American, stirred up one of the bitterest political fights ever known in Wisconsin. The Roman Catholic church, unalterably committed to a system of parochial schools in many of which instruction is given in a foreign language, was for once in accord with the German and Scandinavian Lutherans who maintained similar schools. The compulsory use of English in instructing pupils in specified subjects turned priests and pastors and whole congregations into active, vociferous politicians, for Germans, Norwegians, Poles, and Bohemians claimed the right to educate their children in parochial schools of their own choosing. Was not education education, whether carried on in English or German or Polish or Norwegian? Were not the graduates of church schools, even tho they spoke English brokenly or with brogue, just as intelligent, just as capable, just as industrious, and just as honest, as those educated in the “little red school house” and the public high school?[413] The chairman of the Lutheran Committee on School Legislation stated the matter clearly from the standpoint of the churches:
“The Lutherans of Wisconsin do not oppose the Bennett Law because they are the enemies of the English language.... The Lutherans oppose the present compulsory school law because—whether designedly or not—it in fact infringes on the rights of conscience guaranteed by the constitution, and the right of parents to educate according to their convictions, their own children.... In short, the Lutherans insist upon their right to establish private schools at their own expense, and regulate them, without any interference on the part of the State, ... that their children may become Lutheran Christians as well as loyal and good citizens.”[414] The official circular of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction of Wisconsin, dated January 25, 1890, almost a year after the passage of the act, was a statement of the opposite point of view, and a justification of attempts to enforce the law. Incidentally it was a political pamphlet as well. Superintendent Thayer said: “The thing that is antagonized by this law is the practice of allowing children of this State of proper school age, to pass that period of life without acquiring the minimum of education in elementary branches; without acquiring the ability to think in the language of the country, to express themselves intelligibly in that language, orally, in writing, and in business forms.”
All through the latter part of 1889 and the first ten months of 1890, the agitation went on. The press gave great space to it; some papers through several months, both in Wisconsin and in the neighboring States where Lutherans and Catholics were numerous, offered “symposiums” which printed arguments on both sides.[415] Public Opinion summarized the sentiment for the larger world.[416] Church assemblies took action, and finally an Anti-Bennett Law convention was held in Milwaukee, June 4, 1890.
The Democrats were not slow in seizing the advantage offered, and managed their campaign of 1890 very shrewdly. The combination of sternly anti-Catholic German and Norwegian Lutherans, usually Republican, with Roman Catholics, under the Democratic banner, was irresistible. In spite of the frantic appeals of the Republican press and speakers for loyalty to the American flag and to the “little red school house,” the Democrats elected their candidate for governor, and a legislature pledged to give the desired relief. By the six-line act of February 5, 1891, the Bennett Law was repealed, and two months later another compulsory education act was passed without the offensive and troublesome four words.[417] The work of the Lutheran-Catholic alliance was done; the heterogeneous, naturally antagonistic elements fell apart; and in a few years old party lines were re-established. The plurality of 28,000 by which the Democratic Governor, G. W. Peck, was elected in 1890, overcoming the usual Republican plurality of about 20,000, was reduced at his re-election in 1892 to 7,700. In 1894 the Republican candidate defeated Governor Peck by the handsome plurality of 50,000 votes.[418]
While the Bennett Law agitation was going on in Wisconsin, a similar, but milder disturbance occurred in Illinois. The compulsory education act of the latter State, which went into effect July 1, 1889, was closely, if not deliberately, modelled after the Wisconsin statute, and enacted that “no school shall be regarded as a school under this act, unless there shall be taught therein in the English language, reading, writing, arithmetic, history of the United States, and geography.”[419] In the campaign of 1890, the Republican candidate for State Superintendent of Education, favoring the new compulsory education law, was defeated by some 36,000 votes by Raab, the Democratic candidate who opposed the law. The Norwegians and Danes in the city of Chicago probably voted for Raab in large numbers, tho he won the Swedish wards of that city by small pluralities. In such counties as Knox, with its two thousand Swedish voters, and Winnebago (in which is situated the city of Rockford, with about fifteen hundred Swedish voters), where one-third of the foreign born population was at that time Scandinavian, the Republican candidate received large majorities. A writer for America, the periodical published in English for Scandinavian readers, claimed proudly that “the large Swedish settlements in Henry, Rock Island, Bureau, De Kalb, Henderson, Warren, Mercer, Ford, Whiteside, and other counties cast a solid vote for Edwards.... The Swedes were in favor of compulsory education almost to a man.”[420] In the city of Chicago, the County Superintendent of Schools for Cook County was re-elected by a plurality of 23,000 tho he favored the compulsory law. The repeal of the law of 1889 was not so prompt in Illinois as it was in Wisconsin, for it was not until 1893 that a new and expurgated compulsory education measure took its place.[421]
A close and detailed examination of the legislative journals and the statutes of the Northwestern States does not reveal above a half-dozen laws which can be said to be due to the leadership and direct influence of the Scandinavians as such. On the other hand, in the field of general legislation these men have been indistinguishable from the native-born in ability, efficiency, and uprightness; the gross and net products of the labors of those legislatures with many Scandinavian representatives in such states as Minnesota and North Dakota, are not perceptibly different from the output of legislatures in which no Swede or Norwegian ever sat, as in Michigan or Colorado. Scarcely a law has been passed for the purpose of catering to the preferences, or of catching the vote, of the sons of the Northlands.
An exception to this general statement is the Minnesota law of 1883 providing for the establishment of a “professorship of Scandinavian language and literature in the State University, with the same salary as is paid in said University to other professors of the same grade.” The man to be chosen must be “some person learned in the Scandinavian language and literature, and at the same time skilled and capable of teaching the dead languages so called.”[422]
The motives of the makers of the law were benevolent enough, and circumstances warranted its passage, but nothing could better illustrate the utter carelessness and looseness with which American State legislators do their work, than this simple statute. It was drawn up by a distinguished American lawyer, Gordon E. Cole of St. Paul, at the request of Truls Paulsen by whom it was introduced into the legislature.[423] It created a chair of “Scandinavian language,” when there is no such language, living or dead; the professorship was established “in the State University,” when the laws of the State recognize no institution bearing such a name. The Norwegian who presented the bill, the legislature (including twenty-one other Norwegians and Swedes) which passed it, and the Governor who signed it, all showed the same quality of ignorance and neglect of fact, law, and English. A second law, undoubtedly based directly upon the first, even to copying its confusion of terms, was the act passed by the legislature of North Dakota in 1891, creating a chair of Scandinavian language and literature in the University of North Dakota.[424]
Another statute having still more distinct Scandinavian earmarks was passed by the legislature of North Dakota in 1893, providing for tribunals of conciliation, to be composed of four commissioners of conciliation elected in each town, incorporated village, and city. The measure was modelled in a feeble and tentative fashion after a statute of Norway, where such courts have been in operation since 1824, proving especially efficient in securing amicable adjustment of petty neighborhood difficulties.[425] But the law in North Dakota speedily fell into “innocuous desuetude,” in spite of the enormous percentage of Norwegians in that State; its construction was defective; its constitutionality was questioned; its machinery was cumbersome and expensive. During its first two years, many communities failed to elect commissioners, and no serious attempt was made to comply with its provisions; even the Norwegians themselves manifested no anxiety or haste to make use of this characteristically Norwegian court. Nor did the amendment of 1895, substituting for compulsory use of the tribunal hearings at the request of one party and with the consent of both parties, improve matters. One Norwegian attorney pronounced the law “an unmitigated absurdity under present conditions,” because most suits in the United States arise out of contracts, debts, titles, etc., rather than out of neighborhood quarrels, slanders, and the like.