For many years,
Wisconsin Republicans, led by
political bosses such as
Philetus Sawyer and
Elisha W. Keyes, had carefully avoided antagonizing the German American population, since they had considerable support from German voters. The namesake of the law,
Michael John Bennett, was serving his second term in the State Assembly and had attended a conference in Chicago with educational leaders from various backgrounds to draft
model legislation for educating the youth and ending child labor. The bulk of the Bennett Law dealt with raising the
legal working age to 13 and requiring parents and caregivers to ensure that any child between the ages of 7 and 14 was receiving at least 12 weeks of schooling per year. Due to its mostly non-controversial nature, the law passed quickly almost without any debate. The problematic portion occurred in section 5 of the law, which defined a "school" as an institution which utilized only the English language for instructions on reading, writing, math, and U.S. history. The backlash began shortly after the law was published. Governor Hoard doubled down on his position and attempted to mobilize the English-speaking population of the state for his reelection bid in
1890 by insisting that the state must embrace and enforce the
English only movement. As opposition swelled, Hoard escalated to a defense of the public school system, which was not under attack: "The little schoolhouse—stand by it!" he cried out. Hoard ridiculed the state's German-Americans by claiming that
he was a better guardian of their children's education than their parents or their clergymen. Hoard had counted votes and thought he had a winning coalition by whipping up
nativist distrust of
Germania as
anti-American. In Milwaukee, a predominantly German-speaking city where an estimated 86 percent had foreign-born parents, Hoard attacked Germania and religion: We must fight alienism and selfish ecclesiasticism.... The parents, the pastors and the church have entered into a conspiracy to darken the understanding of the children, who are denied by cupidity and bigotry the privilege of even the free schools of the state. The Germans were incensed at Hoard's blatant attacks not only on their
linguistic rights and culture but also on the independence of their religious schools, which had been set up and funded by the parents in order to inculcate their community's religious values, from
control by the state. Furthermore, Hoard's insistence that the state could legally intervene in the internal affairs of families and church denominations and would now dictate which language students at private schools could speak and learn in was considered intolerable. By June 1890, the state's main German-speaking Lutheran denominations, the
Missouri Synod and the
Wisconsin Synod, had denounced the law. German-American
Roman Catholic priests also denounced the law; Father Johann B. Reindl of
Oshkosh referred to it as "unjust and a blow at the German people". After strong lobbying by Catholic Archbishop
Frederick Katzer of the
Archdiocese of Milwaukee and other parochial leaders, the
Wisconsin Democrats, led by
William F. Vilas took up the cause for German and other
minority languages and nominated Milwaukee Mayor
George Wilbur Peck for governor; neither man was an immigrant, VIlas having been born in Vermont and Peck in New York. Traditionally Democratic
Irish Catholics were initially not as vigorous in opposition to the law, with a substantial section of the community even supporting it, as Hoard had hoped. However, the outpouring of militantly
anti-Catholic rhetoric by Hoard and many of the law's supporters alienated a majority of the Irish in Wisconsin, prompting the top Irish newspaper in the state, the
Chippewa Falls-based
Catholic Citizen, to write that the Bennett Law represented a convergence of "all the sectarian, bigoted, fanatical and crazy impurities" within the Republican Party and which had now taken the reins of power. The Germans, for their part, organized thoroughly and supported Peck. Combined with popular reaction against the new
McKinley Tariff, the result was a major victory for the Democratic Party in Wisconsin, the first in decades. The
Edwards law was a similar law in
Illinois, where the same forces were at work to produce a Democratic win. The law was repealed in 1891, but the Democratic Party won
Wisconsin and
Illinois in the
1892 United States presidential election in part due to lingering opposition to the law. It was the last major attack on German-language education in the U.S. until 1914. In the 1925 case
Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the
U.S. Supreme Court ruled that attacks by the government against the independence of private religious schools violates the
First Amendment to the United States Constitution. ==See also==