By 1870, Milwaukee was the most German city in American.  Milwaukee historian, John Gurda, estimates that over sixty percent of Milwaukeeans spoke primarily German.
Milwaukee became the capital of the German-American Catholics lead by Archbishop Michael Heiss and later Fredrick Katzer. And no other Irish-American bishop would battle the Milwaukee German archbishops more that the archbishop of St. Paul, John Ireland.
 
What Ireland wanted was a truly “American” Catholic Church.   He believed Germans were using their Catholic schools to keep from assimilating into the larger American community.  Catholic German schools taught their children in German and taught the culture and history of the former fatherland.  Ireland preferred to see no Catholic school than one teaching in German.

Milwaukee Archbishop Heiss not only favored Catholic schools, he demanded it.  Heiss instructed his priests not to give absolution to any Catholic that did not send their children to Catholic schools. Heiss would write, “No child of German parents frequents the public schools, for it is better to have their education neglected than to have their souls ruined.”

Irish and Italian Catholics were far more willing to assimilate into the American society says Father Steven Avella, a Marquette University professor who has written extensively on the history of the Milwaukee archdiocese. When Italians were asked to go to Catholic schools, says Avella, they said “Why? There is a perfectly good public school here, and it’s free!”

Many Catholics saw a hostile American society with some justification. Public schools often used the King James version of the Bible and attacked Catholics as anti-American. But Ireland believed that German Catholics were doing themselves no good by isolating themselves through Catholic schools.

In 1888, William Hoard won the race for Wisconsin governor along with a number of progressive Republicans. Assemblyman Michael Bennett of Dodgeville introduced a bill that would bear his name.  The Bennett Law did three things: strengthen compulsory  education, limit child labor, and require instruction to be in English.

The law fit perfectly with Ireland’s views. But the German Catholic hierarchy in Wisconsin was in shock. A sickly Heiss could do little to stop the bill’s passage. He died shortly thereafter. Milwaukee’s next archbishop, Frederick Katzer made repeal of the Bennett Law his first priority.

It wasn’t the “English only” requirement that Catholics objected to, stated Katzer, but that the law placed the state ahead of parents in determining the type and amount of education for their children. “Precisely here the state has encroached upon the rights of the parents.”

Ireland thought the state had every right to set educational standards for everyone.

Nothing brought together Wisconsin’s German Catholics and Lutherans, with a few Norwegians thrown in, than their opposition to the Bennett Law. Governor Hoard and the Republicans were thrown out of office in the 1890 election. The Democratic legislature promptly repealed the Bennett Law.

In time, both Ireland and the German bishops were surprised at the rate at which German children were assimilating despite the efforts of ethnic Catholic schools. Many Catholic schools around the country continued to teach in German more than fifty years after immigrant families came to America. But the grandchildren of immigrants struggled with the German language because few spoke German even at home.

In 1898, the Wisconsin legislature would again pass another English only education bill. But the death blow for German schools came with the beginning of World War One when the United States went to war against Germany. It was time to stop being German and become an American.

Ironically the next German archbishop of Milwaukee, Sebastian Messmer, would negatively comment on the next immigrant group when they wanted their own bishop.  “The Polish are not yet American enough and keep aloof too much from the rest of us.”

Assimilation Continues

As thousands of Latinos march for legalization, new calls are made for “English only” legislation fearing that many Latinos will not assimilate into the general American culture.

“The foreign born [Germans] were clinging to their culture and language far too long,” says Avella, and they made up a much larger percentage of the American population than Latinos do today. So, on one hand, assimilation for Latinos should be easier. Yet Avella says Latinos face additional barriers that Germans did not face: “The United States has traditional regarded Latinos as an inferior people – brown skinned, lazy, Catholic. These stereotypes run very deep in our culture.”

Nevertheless Gurda sees no reason why Latinos will not have the same assimilation patterns as Germans and Poles.

 “Here in America, that process of assimilation is going to continue to go on. Why? The television, if nothing else,” says Avella.

While many see the collapse of the Catholic school system in America in the second half of the twentieth century as a sign of turbulence within the church, it may also be a sign that Catholics finally believed that they would be accepted as full Americans. They no longer had to use Catholic schools for protection. In 1960, voters elected John F. Kennedy to be the first Catholic president. Within a few years, the Second Vatican Council allowed American Catholics to engage even more a modern American society.

 “We overbuilt the Catholic school system. Ultimately, when the numbers collapsed, we found ourselves with a lot of empty buildings,” says Avella. “Once the public school system was purged of its obvious anti-Catholic elements, [some bishops believed] that the public school system could function quite nicely for Catholic children and be amplified by religious instruction.”

Thus, if Catholic schools are to exist well into the twenty-first century, their mission must be to foster a truly Catholic identity within the American culture, not sheltered from it.

“Ireland, and bishops like him, believed that the Church had to adapt to American culture,” concludes Avella, and “that “the American culture and Catholicism were compatible. Catholics could positively affect American culture.”

And Americans they became. Today five of the nine Supreme Court justices are Catholics.

(An edited version of this article appeared in Milwaukee’s Catholic Herald, July 20, 2006)