Bennett Law

The U.S. Civil War led the nation to look to its public schools to produce patriotism and unity. Afterward, states enacted a number of statutes, including compulsory attendance laws, which were supposed to achieve this unity. Schools became more secular, and private schools often were perceived as obstacles to national unity and “good citizenship.” The Bennett Law, enacted in Wisconsin with its large ethnically diverse population, especially German, and its “sister” law in Illinois, the Edwards Law, are fitting illustrations of this tendency. In Wisconsin, the Bennett Law led to a coalition of Catholics and Lutherans, many of German origin, who dissented from this civil legislation. They perceived the Bennett Law as an attempt to eliminate, or at least regulate and control, their schools. The Catholic–Lutheran alliance was successful in its political dissent from the requirements imposed by the Bennett Law and, as a result, maintained a significant degree of freedom in the operation of their schools.

In the 1870s at the national level, President Ulysses S. Grant, and then Congressman James G. Blaine of Vermont, led the onslaught against “sectarian” education. Wisconsin, which entered the union in 1848, originally was dominated by people from the eastern United States. Gradually, due to immigration, this original dominance was challenged. Waves of German Americans entered the state, Catholic and Lutheran, with their commitment to parochial schools as the means to preserve their ethnic and religious heritage. Believing that parents and the church, not the civil state, were the primary educators of their children, these schools often did not report their attendance to [Page 92]the State Superintendent of Education's office. Beginning in the 1860s, state superintendents complained of this behavior. The state legislature began in the 1870s to enact laws that required parents to send their children to school. They did not, however, enact legislation that required private schools to report their attendance to the state superintendent. Meanwhile, by 1880 the Wisconsin Synod Lutherans reported 101 parochial schools, and by 1884 Catholics listed 215 parochial schools in existence in the state.

To complicate matters, some schools, including public, used German as the language of instruction. This reflected the state's population, which by 1880 totaled 410,653 or 31.2% of Wisconsin's 1,315,497 residents who were either native-born Germans themselves or had parents born in Germany. In 1889, following a report from the state superintendent, Jesse B. Thayer, Wisconsin Governor William Dempster Hoard, a Republican, led the movement to enact legislation that authorized local school officials to inspect parochial schools to see that students there were being prepared to read and write English, on the grounds that such abilities were necessary for “good citizenship.”

It was this agitation that led to the passage of the Bennett Law in 1889. The key features of this law required attendance by children between the ages of 7 and 14 for 12 weeks in the town or district in which the child resided and that basic subjects be taught in the English language. Local school officials were empowered to check to see that schools, including private ones, were following the law.

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