PHIL HAMBURGER: The Education Department and the KKK: Nativists originally led the charge for centralized education.
The Trump administration’s desire to dismantle the Education Department has inspired some alarm. Those panicking would do well to remember a key historical fact: One of the leading advocates of creating such a department was the Ku Klux Klan.
Congress authorized today’s Education Department in 1979, transferring authority over federal education policy from the 1953 Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The Constitution didn’t grant Congress regulatory or spending power over education, so for most of U.S. history, education was run primarily by states, localities, churches and parents.
In 1867, Congress created a federal education department, but the tiny department was confined to gathering information and was soon reduced to a bureau. Establishing an education department didn’t return as a popular ambition until the 1920s, when the KKK and other nativist groups made it an explicit goal.
Nativists had supported the 19th-century growth of public schools. They viewed foreigners and the nation’s existing religious diversity—especially Catholicism—as threats to the dominance of Protestantism. To defend their vision of Protestant Americanism, they demanded compulsory public-school attendance, especially in the 1920s.
As the KKK’s Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans declared at the time, “We’ll take every child in all America and put him in the public school of America. . . . We will build a homogenous people, we will grind out Americans like meat out of a grinder.”
The KKK pursued this agenda throughout the 1920s by supporting a bill that sought to create an education department and allocate up to $100 million annually in federal education spending. Unable to secure compulsory public education, the KKK wanted the bill’s subsidies to drive children into public schools that would secure, as Evans said, “the re-Americanization of our common Republic.” The KKK thus made themselves “friends of the measure” and in 1923 urged Protestants to “unite in one campaign” for the bill.
Like meat out of a grinder. Great image for public education.