Milwaukee Public Schools, German Immigration, and the Project of Standardization

When Rufus King Jr. arrived in the Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in September 1845, he was enamored with the opportunity the city presented. A Whig, King situated himself among Milwaukee’s political class as a school reformer—a crusader against the tuition-based system of education that characterized Milwaukee’s nascent system. Having emerged as a serious voice for reform, King was appointed to the territory’s first education convention in 1846 and then sat on the city’s citizens’ committee to draft an educational charter for Milwaukee. As a result, the charter reflected many of the same principles of common education that had been adopted in New England and his home state of New York. As Kyle Steele has noted, King’s educational philosophy reflected the approach his mentor, William Seward, former governor of New York, had taken to education: inclusivity. Thus, English education, though not exclusively so, was made a foundational feature of Milwaukee Public Schools in 1846 when the local school board crafted a formal funding scheme that required English language instruction.Footnote ⁹

Tucked in the text of the local “Act Relating to Common Schools in the City of Milwaukee” was a conditional measure related to the distribution of public funds for education: “No school which is now, or may hereafter be established within the limits of the city, shall be entitled to any share of the moneys raised or received for school purposes, unless there shall be an actual average daily attendance of thirty scholars, nor unless the English language be taught therein as a branch of education.”Footnote ¹⁰ The passage of the law had coincided with the first major influx of German immigrants to the city and state more broadly.Footnote ¹¹ Importantly, this early example of legislation on language instruction offered significant flexibility in how schools were required to provide English learning for students.Footnote ¹² In the course of his advocacy, King remarked that “knowledge taught by any sect (or in any language) is better than ignorance.”Footnote ¹³ A mere course dedicated to English language acquisition would suffice, leaving intact the option for primary instruction in a foreign language in Milwaukee’s public schools. Notably, the 1846 law applied only to public funds for public schools; the private and parochial schools of Milwaukee, funded by congregations, religious and ethnic communities, and tuition dollars, were shielded from any legislative oversight and were free to continue offering little or no English language instruction.

Since the first German-speaking immigrants arrived in the late 1840s, the German private and parochial school system flourished in Milwaukee, passing on the “mother tongue” and assiduously reinforcing German religious and cultural values.Footnote ¹⁴ By 1849, twenty-seven private and parochial schools serving 722 students were already operating in the city, compared with eight public schools serving just under a thousand students.Footnote ¹⁵ These schools were religiously oriented, attending to the needs of German Catholics and German Protestants, respectively. At the time, German immigrants made up over a third of the population of Milwaukee, yet many did not find American public schools up to the educational standards of the German states. However, German Freethinkers, who were broadly atheistic and opposed the power of the church, had few options for their children to pursue German language education, public or private.Footnote ¹⁶ As a result, many enrolled in the public ward schools and utilized their communal structure to meet the linguistic and cultural needs of the community.Footnote ¹⁷ Because German immigrants were not a monolithic group, differing in their religious, economic, and political convictions, language became a particularly important and unifying demarcation of German culture in America. The ethnic group, many prominent Germans reasoned, would not be maintained without a linguistic bond.Footnote ¹⁸

Simultaneously, the growing influx of German immigrants animated state officials on the question of mandatory English language instruction in Wisconsin’s public schools. In 1850, acting in his capacity to hear appeals to educational policies, State Superintendent of Public Schools Eleazer Root encouraged “our German fellow citizens” to “feel the necessity and importance of having their children well and thoroughly taught in the English language.” Although the superintendent only oversaw the state’s public schools, he encouraged the numerous German private schools to “employ … such teachers as can teach readily in English.”Footnote ¹⁹ Four years later, Root’s successor, State Superintendent Hiram Wright, reiterated concerns about the German language dominating some public schools, calling the teaching of core subjects in German a mere “substitute,” and declared that German communities must “maintain a school in English.”Footnote ²⁰ While superintendents were concerned about what they considered to be a German language “problem,” neither they nor state lawmakers initiated policies to restrict its use.

State Superintendent Wright’s perception that German language instruction dominated some public schools was not unfounded. Primary instruction in German was common in rural Wisconsin public schools, and it had become a facet of education in some of Milwaukee’s majority-German ward schools. In 1851, just five years after the adoption of the city charter and the establishment of five ward schools, German bilingual education emerged out of necessity in the absence of formal policy adopting a common language of instruction.Footnote ²¹ Here, bilingual instruction refers to conducting education in a minority language while simultaneously using English as a form of communication.Footnote ²² Such a system of bilingual education never formally emerged in Milwaukee, but early unregulated ward schools likely operated in such a manner.Footnote ²³ Instead, German soon became, first unofficially, and later by design, a special course of instruction in the school district—a stand-alone, optional subject. While the development of German as a stand-alone course marked a shift away from the informal bilingual education that had developed in some Milwaukee public schools, it marked the standardization of language instruction in the district.

Prior to the broader standardization that took place to implement a district-wide German language course in 1867, the School Board did not have the capacity to control the teaching of German at the ward level. The majority-German Sixth Ward, for instance, discontinued its German language course in 1861, just two years after its inception.Footnote ²⁴ By contrast, a formalized German language course was established in the same decade, prior to the creation of the district-wide course, in the majority-German Second and Ninth wards.Footnote ²⁵ By then, the question of where German belonged in Milwaukee’s public schools had become an unavoidable discussion at school board meetings as ward schools retained significant autonomy.

By 1867, however, competition with local private and parochial schools for enrollment had become a pressing issue for the School Board. With forty-seven private schools serving approximately 6,400 students, most with German religious and cultural affiliations, a standardization of a German language course offering in the public school system, the School Board reasoned, would simultaneously expand its enrollment and regulate the use of the German language in the public schools.Footnote ²⁶ Amending their 1846 law in 1867, Milwaukee County permanently and explicitly prohibited teaching in foreign languages in public schools. But to draw the city’s large German population into the public schools, the county incentivized the teaching of foreign languages as an independent subject.Footnote ²⁷

The following year, the Milwaukee County Board of School Directors—now composed of a majority of German immigrants—authorized funds for the placement of a German language teacher in each Milwaukee public school. They acted swiftly, hiring German language instructors in six of the district’s nine wards.Footnote ²⁸ A stand-alone German language course became a standard feature across the district regardless of the cultural, linguistic, and ethnic makeup of the student body. Although teaching was rapidly professionalizing, German language instructors were not yet required to possess a formal license. That did not mean there was a shortage of well-qualified teachers; most instructors hired in the district were graduates of the local bilingual education institution, the German-English Academy, founded in 1851.Footnote ²⁹

The Academy, a private institution, was central to the proliferation of German pedagogy in Milwaukee Public Schools. It was founded by German and German American liberals who distinguished themselves from their Catholic and Lutheran counterparts through their belief that public education, rather than religious principles, could most effectively guide social change.Footnote ³⁰ Judging by declining enrollment numbers, however, niche liberal pedagogy, including a bilingual curriculum, did not appeal to very many Germans in Milwaukee.

Therefore, Milwaukee’s public schools, not the German-English Academy responsible for churning out many of the school district’s German language instructors, became “the real focus of German-American activities for educational reform,” as historian Bettina Goldberg points out.Footnote ³¹ Even as the School Board worked to overcome issues of funding, insolvency, and insufficient school buildings, it prioritized the implementation of—and provided the necessary funds for—a German language course.Footnote ³² Upon passage of the 1867 Milwaukee County law that prohibited the use of foreign language as the primary language of instruction in the public school system, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Alexander Craig publicly derided any attempts to impinge upon private or parochial schools as “impolitic.” Instead, he saw the Milwaukee law as an exemplar for improving public schooling. Craig believed such standardized curricular improvements would, eventually, make private and parochial schools obsolete.Footnote ³³

Although private and parochial schools continued to operate in large numbers in Milwaukee, the standardization of German language as an independent subject resulted in an immediate increase in public school enrollment, especially throughout Milwaukee’s German wards.Footnote ³⁴ By 1872, further bureaucratization took place as the Board created a mechanism for oversight, the Standing Committee on German, responsible for all aspects of the implementation of the course of study. In just five years, the German language course, which was optional and required a written opt-in from parents, had achieved an enrollment rate of over 50 percent of students, the majority of whom were of German heritage.Footnote ³⁵

Though the efficacy and necessity of the German language course was challenged in the city, the program was broadly successful in drawing German students into the public school system. It also demonstrated the durability and influence of the Prussian system of standardized and consolidated schooling, which many of Milwaukee’s German immigrants fondly recalled.Footnote ³⁶ Milwaukee’s approach to assimilation through public education reflected the system’s foundational commitment to inclusivity. In spite of a statewide hum of anti-German sentiment, which understood foreignness to be incompatible with Americanization, conflated language with patriotism, and urged that English be the primary language of school instruction, school officials in Milwaukee reiterated their ongoing commitment to the German language program.

In 1872, Milwaukee superintendent Frederick Lau conceded that American citizens ought to “have a common language” but rejected that foreign language courses, specifically those in German, were inherently “adverse to the American idea.” In fact, Lau heralded the assimilatory power of a simple German language course to create a new, more American identity among the foreign population. Such references to the assimilatory nature of a German language course became central to school officials’ arguments in defense of the course across the next two decades. Gustav Trumpff, himself a German immigrant and president of the Milwaukee Board of School Directors, remarked in 1874 that “efforts have been made to compel discontinuance [of the German language course].”Footnote ³⁷ Though that opposition was largely articulated in economic terms, ethnic animus was an animating factor. Superintendent Lau defended the program against concerns over its cost, publishing a report that showed “the cost of instruction per pupil is less in Milwaukee than in most [other midwestern cities].”Footnote ³⁸

The economic arguments employed by those who opposed the German language course came on the heels of the Panic of 1873. However, Milwaukee’s economy was generally detached from dependence on the financial capital of eastern cities and initially remained relatively insulated from economic ruin.Footnote ³⁹ Yet, as Milwaukee struggled to maintain its school buildings, the opposition reasoned, what business did it have levying taxes on American citizens for the purposes of teaching German? Reflecting on his position as a “German by birth and education,” Trumpff argued that the implementation and continuance of German language education was “expedient” for the district. To counter the anti-German arguments that had precipitated calls for its removal, Trumpff expounded on the social function of Milwaukee Public Schools to overcome the “Germanization” of students of German heritage. If the district removed German language from the curriculum, Trumpff argued, “three-fourths of all the children of German parentage” would be driven from the public school system and into the unregulated private and parochial system, where “good English education [is] limited.” This would “keep such [German] pupils away from association with pupils of American birth, and create a clannish spirit among German children.” “In a word,” he continued, “they will furnish the best means conceivable to Germanize them.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Lau, Trumpff, and other defenders of the German language course saw a distinct value in a culturally diverse student body, and they continued to support the teaching of German as a financially feasible way to Americanize its growing foreign population.

Both Lau and Trumpff espoused the ideology that undergirded the implementation and embrace of German language and culture in the local schools. As Bettina Goldberg noted, the development of the German language course was not the result of “an organized ethnic movement.”Footnote ⁴¹ Instead, it was a pragmatic, top-down project of standardization with two related goals: to bolster public school enrollment and to control the conditions under which German language and culture were transmitted in order to properly “Americanize” pupils.Footnote ⁴² Without the embrace of German in the public schools, Trumpff implied, students of German parentage would be insufficiently Americanized, evidenced by a lack of enrollment and exposure to English language education. Subsequent school officials validated that assumption. In 1879, Milwaukee superintendent James MacAlister directly attributed the program to bolstering the district’s German enrollment: “German instruction has brought large accessions to the Public Schools from the German population.”Footnote ⁴³ Arguments in favor of the continuance and even expansion of the German language course were thus not merely limited to the social functions of language.

School officials also expounded the pedagogical benefits of foreign language acquisition. For example, Milwaukee’s Committee on German published a celebratory report in 1873 that articulated how exposure to the German language would facilitate better English language understanding. In it they quoted New York City public school superintendent Henry Kiddle, who, like the directors of Milwaukee Public Schools, saw the results of foreign language instruction as “confirm[ing], to some degree at least, the theory which I have always held in regard to the study of German in our schools; namely, that far from retarding, or in any way interfering with the other branches of study, it would tend to facilitate them.” As such, the Committee recommended making German language instruction compulsory for all students in the lower grades and proposed that grade “promotion” should not be awarded “unless their progress in German qualifies them for a higher grade.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Although a compulsory German language course never materialized, the Board did adopt the Committee’s recommendation that such an offering become a graded course that an enrolled student must pass to advance in grade.

Further curricular standardization took place in 1874, when the Board approved a plan crafted by the Committee on German to offer two different pedagogical approaches to German language education in the public schools. Having observed that students of German parentage, who almost exclusively spoke German at home, were progressing much more rapidly than their non-German counterparts, the district recognized the need for a differentiated course of instruction. Thus, they devised a standardized plan for schools based on the percentage of students that were “of German parentage” or “of non-German parentage,” utilizing different textbooks and activities to best promote German language acquisition depending upon prior knowledge.Footnote ⁴⁵

Concurrent enrollment declines in the German-American Academy and the founding of the National German-American Teachers’ Seminary reflected a significant shift in the educational demands in Milwaukee. By 1878, the public school’s German language program had successfully drawn more German students into the public school system. As a result, the demand for bilingual education offered by the German-American Academy correspondingly declined. Instead, secular German American leaders pivoted toward teacher training with the establishment of the National German-American Teachers’ Seminary in 1878.

Competing Visions for American Identity: The Bennett Law and Communal Backlash

The vision that State Superintendent Craig espoused in 1867 of a superior, standardized public educational experience became the official position for the Republican Party’s school policy agenda throughout the 1870s. Even as standardization and Germanic reforms proliferated, educational truancy emerged as a serious concern in 1873. That year, the state superintendent of public instruction, Samuel Fallows, issued a special report advocating for the establishment of a statewide compulsory school law. Concerned with the social ramifications of an uneducated populace, Fallows anchored his argument for compulsory education in the logic behind existing tax law: “If the payment of taxes for educational purposes is made compulsory, should not education be compulsory?”Footnote ⁴⁶ The proposal received immediate backlash. A. M. Thomson, editor of the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, derided the dichotomy of parental choice that allowed parents to send their children to “private instead of public school.” Instead, Thomson thought, parents should be free to choose whether to send their children to school at all, and categorized any imposed limitations on that choice as “tyranny.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Regardless, the Republican-led Wisconsin legislature established a statewide compulsory school law in 1879 as it continued to battle a decades-long decline at the polls.Footnote ⁴⁸ Still, the enforcement mechanisms for the law were woefully ineffective and it had little impact on truancy throughout the decade.Footnote ⁴⁹

Nearly ten years later, the superintendent of public instruction, Jesse Thayer, raised concerns in his 1888 biennial report that schools, amid a steadily growing state population, had seen a decrease in public attendance relative to population growth.Footnote ⁵⁰ In addition, private and parochial schools had no requirement to report attendance data to the state, leaving officials uninformed about just how pervasive truancy had become. As concerns grew over truancy and illiteracy, compounded by a second wave of Eastern European immigration, the Republican-led legislature began reformulating the compulsory school law.

By 1889, Superintendent Thayer’s concern had influenced newly elected Republican governor William Hoard to propose legislative educational reform that linked truancy to concerns over English language learning.Footnote ⁵¹ In his inaugural address, Hoard expounded his educational philosophy: “Especially [citizens] have the right to demand that [they] be provided with the ability to read and write the language of this country.”Footnote ⁵² For Hoard’s Republican Party, the language in which education was delivered determined future opportunities available for Wisconsin’s immigrants. He formally proposed legislation to “require that reading and writing in English be taught daily” in all Wisconsin schools.Footnote ⁵³ To Hoard, schools were the most important institution in securing economic and social mobility, which required the state—rather than local committees—to compel linguistic assimilation through formal educational institutions that implemented an English-only curriculum.Footnote ⁵⁴ The legislature quickly began formulating a remedy.

The resulting “Act Concerning the Education and Employment of Children,” commonly referred to as the Bennett Law, began as something wholly unremarkable: a legislative remedy to address truancy and declining literacy rates.Footnote ⁵⁵ The legislation passed both chambers unanimously without comment. Its namesake, Pine Knot representative Michael Bennett, widely circulated the text of the law to Wisconsin educators without traceable dissent.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Milwaukee Daily Sentinel offered the state’s first banal report on the law just after Hoard signed it in April 1889, making no mention of an impending controversy.Footnote ⁵⁷ Shortly thereafter, however, a contentious debate prompted by the law over the proper role of schools in a multicultural, democratic society exploded across numerous newspaper articles, editorials, speeches, and pamphlets throughout Wisconsin. At the center of the controversy was Section 5 of the Bennett Law, which stated plainly that “no school shall be regarded as a school” except those that “taught therein reading, writing, arithmetic and United States history in the English language.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Earlier legislation on language policy in 1846 and 1867 in Milwaukee, which had affected only the public schools, was now usurped by the authorization of administrative oversight in private and parochial schools throughout the state. For the German community, the consequences of Section 5 meant that parochial education in German would no longer satisfy the requirements to qualify as schools. At best, their children would be forced into public schools; at worst, the German parochial school would, as Superintendent Craig had hoped two decades earlier, be “aboli[shed].”Footnote ⁵⁹

That same year, Illinois’s Republican-led legislature passed the “Edwards Law” with nearly identical provisions, requiring both public and private schools in the state to teach core subjects in English. Camps in both major parties in Illinois and Wisconsin were part of a broader “Americanization” movement during the Progressive Era, though their approaches fundamentally differed. As Cody Dodge Ewert has explained, these efforts, whether exclusive, in the case of the English-only education required by the Bennett Law or the Edwards Law, or inclusive, in the case of the development of foreign language programs, both aimed to make their respective constituents “zealous supporters of public education.”Footnote ⁶⁰ These trends ran parallel to the idea that schools were sites to produce “good citizenship” while reinforcing racial hierarchies, as the Milwaukee school system had.Footnote ⁶¹

Quickly organizing in opposition to the Bennett Law, Lutheran and Evangelical synods convened in Milwaukee, Portage, and Sheboygan to condemn the law’s threatened “anglicization” of the German community. The meetings reflected a shared belief that schools were an essential component of “the sacred duty of all true Christians to train their children to obedience to God’s command” and in “rais[ing] … loyal and useful citizens.”Footnote ⁶² Reporting on the meetings, the Wisconsin State Register recognized the political ramifications of a united religious front that represented “the sentiments of no less than 60,000 to 70,000 voters.”Footnote ⁶³ One outcome of the meeting was the production of a report by the Committee on the Compulsory School Law, which became the basis for a more public campaign to defeat the Bennett Law. Led by Christian Koerner, editor of Die Germania, the most popular German-language newspaper in Milwaukee, the Anti-Bennett State Central Committee broadly circulated the Committee’s arguments against the law.

In a scathing dissent, Koerner highlighted the unique role of parochial schools in reproducing cultural capital: “If the state can say what any church or association of parents shall teach to their own children, then there is no longer any … authority to teach anything except at the direction and dictation of the state.” Koerner contended that parochial schools were “maintain[ed] at great expense in every congregation” to “inculcate this precious faith in their children.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Crude appeals to personal identity “called [Germans] to arms” against the Bennett Law, which, the opposition contended, sought to “ruin” the “chaste and beautiful German language, for the eternal detriment of the religion of the children.”Footnote ⁶⁵ As opposition to the Bennett Law grew, the discourse remained consistent that the law posed a serious threat to the preservation of German cultural and religious identity. Germans, then, were prepared to fight the Bennett Law through “the courts or the ballot box.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Additionally, political recourse was not the purview only of the Lutheran German community. Though they were often in tension, the Bennett Law united Wisconsin’s Lutheran and Catholic German communities in opposition to legislative encroachment on their private schools.Footnote ⁶⁷ The Columbia, a Catholic newspaper, remarked in October of 1889 that “it is not too early to call attention to the fact that, in consequence of the notorious Bennett school law, this election will be of more importance than usual.”Footnote ⁶⁸ German Catholics established the Catholic State Central Anti-Bennett Law Committee (not to be confused with the similarly named “Anti-Bennett State Central Committee” that emerged from the synod conventions), working in tandem with its Lutheran counterpart to better organize German opposition to the law.Footnote ⁶⁹ Further, the Deutsche Männer Verein, a representative body for German Catholics, issued resolutions “condemning the attempts to infringe upon the rights of German Catholics,” which the newspaper understood as a “full commit[ment] to the agitation for the repeal of the obnoxious [Bennett] law.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The Wisconsin State Register claimed that not “a single German paper in the state,” regardless of religious affiliation, “even tolerates the law.”Footnote ⁷¹ The united ethnic front that was emerging in 1890 posed a serious threat to Governor Hoard’s reelection bid.

In the face of increasing opposition and threats of political action, Governor Hoard attempted to defuse the anti-German perception of the Bennett Law in an 1890 speech. His position reflected the nativist underpinnings of the Republican position on schools, calling the law a method of “advancement for [German] youth” who “without a knowledge of the English language” would lack prospects for economic and social mobility.Footnote ⁷² His colleague, Senator J. C. Spooner, doubled down on Republican support for the bill. What emerged from Spooner’s speech was a Republican corollary to the German calls to both literally and metaphorically “rise up” against the Bennett Law. Rallying around the public and Protestant character of the common school, Spooner sparked a movement that understood schoolhouses and, by extension, the Bennett Law, as “republican lines of fortification” for the “defense” of democracy.Footnote ⁷³ A slogan emerged among popular supporters of the Bennett Law: “Stand By It!”Footnote ⁷⁴ Spooner’s rhetoric reflected the nationalist sentiment of many progressive reformers who aligned specific school policy with achieving the nation’s “democratic promise.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Having been elected largely with the support of rural farmers, Republicans turned to cultural symbols that resonated with their base in a bid for reelection.Footnote ⁷⁶ In a bald appeal to rural voters, among whom the law was “popular,” the “little red schoolhouse” became the cultural icon for the preservation of the Protestant, English-speaking character of Wisconsin; the Bennett Law served as an explicit attempt to “Americanize a large population” that Republicans saw as “kept in virtually foreign schools.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Those in opposition were vilified as “enemies of the common school,” though who exactly opposed the law was not as clear as might seem.Footnote ⁷⁸

Although the chasm was not as neatly drawn along partisan religious and political lines as some suggested, each wing articulated its belief in the power of education to reproduce or alter cultural identity. The Catholic Citizen, a Milwaukee-based newspaper, conceded that German parochial school students could benefit from an increased attention to the English language.Footnote ⁷⁹ In Manitowoc County, the Sisters of St. Francis contended that “English [already] takes the lead in all the Catholic schools.”Footnote ⁸⁰ The Evangelical Synod of North America also convened and issued multiple resolutions extolling the necessity of English language instruction and acquisition in its parochial schools.Footnote ⁸¹ The Janesville Gazette quoted local Catholic priest Father Hannan, who referred to the Bennett Law as a “wise piece of legislation.”Footnote ⁸² He continued: “There is no doubt that all children should be trained in the English language.”Footnote ⁸³

The lack of a true religious consensus also held for the political parties. A small subset of the Democratic Party launched the Democratic Bennett Law League, echoing Republican sentiment for the teaching of English in schools as necessary to “secure the proper equipment of [German] children for citizenship.”Footnote ⁸⁴ The president of the Milwaukee branch of the National British Association, Democrat George Gooch, called the Bennett Law a “defense” of the “public schools,” which he viewed as the “foundation of the present greatness of our nation.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Other Democrats offered less principled support for the law, considering people who opposed the law in Milwaukee to be “digging their own graves.”Footnote ⁸⁶ As a mostly unified German community had voiced its readiness to challenge the Bennett Law at the ballot box, Democrats who opposed pursuing the Bennett Law as a key issue in the upcoming Milwaukee elections—the first barometer of the electorate’s stance on the law—would soon be proven poor political prognosticators.

The Milwaukee mayoral election would test the extent to which the German community, which had a record of voting solidly Republican in the city and the state, would turn out at the polls to oppose the Bennett Law. George Wilbur Peck, a Milwaukee-based newspaper owner and editor, emerged as a serious candidate amid the growing controversy. Famed for his publication of Peck’s Sun, which garnered widespread readership for the humorous, satirical “Bad Boy” stories that appeared in the paper, Peck was well known in Milwaukee among both the working and business classes.Footnote ⁸⁷ Working-class Milwaukeeans engaged with Peck’s writing as entertainment while the city’s businessmen purchased advertising space in his publications.Footnote ⁸⁸ His candidacy hinged on his staunch opposition to the Bennett Law, and his nomination speech to the Democratic Convention focused almost exclusively on schooling. Advocating for “those who pay for private schooling” to “teach their children their own religion,” Peck had successfully allied himself with the German community of Milwaukee and emerged victorious on the strength of the German vote.Footnote ⁸⁹

Peck’s victory in the Milwaukee mayoral election sent shockwaves through the Republican Party.Footnote ⁹⁰ Not only did the Democrats win the mayoralty, they also saw a complete down ballot sweep, including the election of nineteen Germans to the city government.Footnote ⁹¹ Die Germania hailed the election as a “wonderful victory for Germandom over narrow-hearted nativism.”Footnote ⁹² Speaking the following day, Governor Hoard condemned the Democratic victory in Milwaukee and chose to double down on his educational vision that German economic and social mobility hinged on “that unrivaled, that invaluable political and moral institution … the New England system of free schools.”Footnote ⁹³ Given that the Milwaukee German community found social and economic success for decades thanks, in part, to a school system that supported linguistic diversity rather than the imposition of English monolingualism, Hoard’s claims had already been disproved. Thus, the Milwaukee mayoral election was just the first in a series of electoral victories that would ultimately dismantle, at least temporarily, Republican control of Wisconsin. Hoard’s speech proved remarkably obtuse, as he would soon face Peck in the 1890 gubernatorial election, where schools would be on the ballot again.Footnote ⁹⁴

The centrality of education to partisan politics in Wisconsin cannot be overstated. While the Democratic Party nationally was focused on opposition to the “McKinley Tariff,” Wisconsin Democrats focused on the cultural and religious chasm unfolding in the state.Footnote ⁹⁵ To both supporters and opponents, educational institutions, whether public or private, were places of cultural reproduction or reimagination. The increasingly centralized control of schools in Wisconsin reflected the Republican belief that the state had a unique ability to remake American culture through education. Likewise, the almost uniform dissension over the Bennett Law among the German community, whether Catholic, Lutheran, or anticlerical, demonstrated the centrality of schools in the reproduction of cultural heritage, primarily through language. Familial time and congregational gatherings undoubtedly played a critical role in the reproduction of cultural heritage in the German community as well. But by the 1890s, school years had continued to lengthen by legislative decree with little opposition, creating a formal, everyday institution through which German culture could be passed on.Footnote ⁹⁶ The relegation of the German tongue to ecclesiastics was untenable for the German community.

With the gubernatorial election approaching, Peck’s stunning mayoral victory in Milwaukee garnered him significant statewide attention. Overnight, his willingness to oppose the Bennett Law with forceful rhetoric allowed him to leapfrog more prominent members of the party.Footnote ⁹⁷ The La Crosse Chronicle cited the “spontaneity” with which Peck was elected in Milwaukee as reason for supporting him as the Democratic gubernatorial candidate.Footnote ⁹⁸ The Neenah City Times predicted that Wisconsin voters would “rally with renewed vigor and enthusiasm” to elect Peck as governor.Footnote ⁹⁹ The Juneau Telephone similarly supported Peck as the Democratic nominee, in light of his “triumphant” victory in Milwaukee.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ He successfully garnered the support of the party, and his nomination acceptance speech promised that “the law that has caused all the trouble will be repealed.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Peck would go on to face the incumbent Hoard, who continued to support the Bennett Law.

Peck’s election, however, was far from foreordained. Milwaukee, though solidly Republican, supported more parochial schools than any other county in Wisconsin, and the politically active cultural and religious community had, due to the Bennett Law controversy, recognized its strength in shifting local policy. But the Bennett Law could not be overturned at the local level. The organized opposition to the Bennett Law could not stop with Milwaukee politics, and the German community had its sights set on a statewide repeal.

However, Democratic Party members could not reach a consensus on the Bennett Law as clearly as their Republican counterparts could. Some Democratic figures objected to the party nominee and threw their support behind Hoard.Footnote ¹⁰² The Democratic Bennett Law League, claiming membership of about ten thousand, “open[ly] pledge[d] to vote against the Peck ticket.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Nonetheless, Wisconsin, largely on the back of the German community in and beyond Milwaukee, elected Democrat George Peck as governor in 1890. Down ballot, only one Republican staved off the wave of Democratic victories in state government elections; the State Assembly shifted from a Republican supermajority to a Democratic one.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The Democratic Party swiftly repealed and replaced the Bennett Law but kept intact the provisions that pertained to truancy, child labor, and compulsory attendance.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Democratic representation did not stop at the statehouse. Wisconsin also sent a Democratic senator, William F. Vilas, to Washington in 1891. John Spooner, the firebrand Republican senator responsible for the slogan “Stand By It!,” was another high-profile casualty of the Bennett Law campaign. Upon losing, he remarked: “The defeat was inevitable. The school law did it—a silly, sentimental and damn useless abstraction foisted upon us by a self-righteous demagogue.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ After failing to carry Wisconsin in the presidential election in 1884, Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland won the state in 1892, the first Democrat to do so since the formation of the national Republican Party in Wisconsin in 1854.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Wisconsin would also choose Democratic senator John Mitchell in 1893, sending two Democrats to the Capitol for the first time since 1850. Though Democratic control of the state would begin to unravel before the next century, the German community had successfully organized around that fundamental institution for the maintenance of culture: the schoolhouse. Significant statewide political shifts in the 1890s seemed to encourage the Milwaukee School Board to expand the pluralistic Americanization project beyond German language. Though the German language program wavered, it ultimately remained intact through the Great Depression.

The Post-Bennett Public School: Toward a Truer Pluralism

In the wake of the Bennett Law repeal, attitudes about belonging in Milwaukee had clearly shifted. The passage, backlash, and repeal of the law had an impact on the School Board. Although in practice the Bennett Law primarily targeted rural public schools and the state’s numerous private and parochial schools, public debate had been most protracted in Wisconsin’s cities.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Yet within five years, the Milwaukee School Board had succumbed to some opposition, chipping away at the foundation it had laid for the teaching of German throughout the public school system. The timing of these reconsiderations reflected a confluence of multiple factors.

The destabilization of the German language course in Milwaukee was a drawn-out process that waxed and waned relative to other district-wide considerations. There was no unilateral decision to undermine the existence of the course; it was the product of demographic changes, shifting pedagogical attitudes, and renewed concerns over district insolvency. With few federal restrictions for European migrants, Milwaukee continued to see an influx of new émigrés through the 1890s. Unlike their midcentury counterparts, many of whom came to the United States seeking democratic order after the failed 1848 revolutions, or who sold their land holdings in the mid-1860s and sought to reestablish themselves in the commercial system in the United States, the migrants of the 1880s and 1890s had been forced into landlessness after the consolidation and unification of northeastern Germany and sought opportunities anew.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Beyond Germans, migrants of various other groups came from eastern and southern Europe, including many Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and Jews who “had been subjects of the great autocratic empires of Europe and Eurasia.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ This influx in migration intensified calls for a more aggressive assimilative educational system as debates emerged about the capacity of education to properly “Americanize” immigrants. Further, progressive reformers began to call into question the usefulness of a universal foreign language course. On the basis of utility, “social efficiency” reformers, to borrow Kliebard’s categorization, attacked foreign language offerings as wasteful and without direct relation to social functioning.Footnote ¹¹¹ Others who advocated for a child-centered pedagogical movement derided foreign languages as ill-suited for elementary-aged students. Conversely, supporters of foreign language teaching argued that it was sound pedagogy for developing a well-rounded, educated child, a key remedy, they thought, to the problems posed by a diverse urban populace. However, as immigration continued and education policy became more reflective of economic conditions, defending a foreign language program on fiscal terms became an uphill battle for the Milwaukee School Board.

Beyond social efficiency, reformers were also concerned with the economic efficiency of schools. Borrowing directly from the tactics utilized by consolidated firms and their focus on centralization, standardization, bureaucracy, and expert oversight, district officials became acutely aware of education as a form of investment. In accordance with prevailing economic principles, administrators sought a return on the use of public monies for “educational machinery.”Footnote ¹¹² Weary of charges of corruption in an increasingly centralized and anti-democratic structure and stricken by the spell of commercialism, school officials worked to avoid any perception of profligate spending on unnecessary programs. Collectively, these issues weakened the saliency of the German language as a standardized course throughout the district.

In 1896, the School Board began discussing a reduction in German teacher salaries, advanced on the premise that German teachers were overcompensated relative to the work they performed. At the time, German teacher compensation was equal to that of core subject teachers. Consideration of the salary reduction caused a considerable rift between the Finance Committee and Committee on German. Expectedly, the Committee on German forcefully rejected the notion that German teachers “are over-paid for the work performed.”Footnote ¹¹³ Rather, Committee members argued, German language teaching required “scholarship and labor considerably in excess” of that of traditional classroom teachers. Further, they warned that a salary reduction would reduce the quality, and thus, popularity, of the German language program. Nonetheless, despite concerns voiced by the Committee on German to “indefinitely postpone” the salary deduction resolution, the Board in 1897 approved a district-wide reduction in the annual salary of “special teachers of German” from $1,100 annually to $900. Equal compensation for German teachers, the School Board reasoned, was “disproportionate” to the workload, arguing that core subject teachers engaged in “work that is far more exacting.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Such a rationale rejected the position put forth by the Committee on German.

The following year, the School Board continued to debate the merits of continuing the German language program throughout the district. The timing was not a coincidence: that same year, the School Board had received a recommendation from Milwaukee’s growing Polish population to introduce a Polish language course. By then, Polish-born or Polish-speaking students comprised approximately 8,000 of the 19,618 students enrolled in private schools in Milwaukee. The Polish Educational Society contended that Polish private school students were, like their German counterparts before them, “deprived of the opportunity of free school education.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Echoing earlier arguments put forward by the Board in favor of German, advocates reasoned that the introduction of Polish in the public school system would “stimulate the attendance of Polish children in the public schools.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Unlike the German language course, such instruction would not be standardized across the district. Instead, the School Board set a conditional enrollment benchmark of 250 students at any of the district schools in order to accommodate a Polish language course therein. However, advocates failed to garner the required enrollment, and implementation of the Polish language course was stifled. As a result, the Board considered itself “absolved” from further consideration of the matter.

Advocacy for a publicly funded Polish language course reflected the shifting demographics of the city of Milwaukee and the needs and wants of its growing public school student population. Addressing the reduction of German language teacher pay in his 1897 annual report, Superintendent H. O. R. Seifert derided earlier rationalizations by the Board for the creation and continuance of the German language course. He called it a “mistake” to advance an argument in favor of a German language course that was presented as “merely a concession to the German element, or because it happens to be of practical utility for this city.” Instead, Superintendent Seifert saw the merits of a standardized German language course on pedagogical grounds, offering anecdotal evidence that students with a “good knowledge of German” better understood linguistic concepts in comparison to their peers who “know one language only.” He claimed such educational benefits need not only come from the teaching of German. “French is just as desirable,” he quipped.

Superintendent Seifert’s defense of foreign language instruction was a response to the School Board considering outright elimination of the German language program in 1896 in “the lower grades.” In order to remedy the district’s budgetary deficit, those in favor of its elimination argued that removing German teacher salaries could solve the problem. Hoping that public opinion would help bolster their case, they conducted a survey of parents of schoolchildren regarding elimination. The survey’s results showed that 76 percent of respondents “were in favor of [teaching] German” throughout the district.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Further derailing attempts to eliminate the German language course in the lower grades was the fact that most survey respondents were from families whose children were enrolled in primary school—the very target of the budgetary cuts. The German language course in the primary grades had survived the economically motivated attack.

Such a development raises questions about the legitimacy of economic arguments that sought to limit or eliminate the German language course in Milwaukee Public Schools. The importance of English monolingualism to American identity was a popular notion in late nineteenth-century America, though in Milwaukee those arguments never gained traction at the administrative level. Although the German language program heightened tensions among different School Board members and the public at large, the district saw increased hiring of German language teachers over the next few years. From 1894 to 1904, the number of German language teachers employed by the district rose from fifty-eight to ninety. The question of the financial viability of the German language program continued to seep into yearly reflections. Pointing out the two-dollar increase in per-pupil expenditures that the district sustained, A. G. Wright noted in 1905—and it is unclear whether he was delighted or disturbed—that it was “an expense that few other cities incur.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

By the early 1910s, the district had expanded its language learning options to include Polish, Italian, and French, echoing Superintendent Seifert’s earlier sentiment.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Those programs, however, were meant to function as independent rather than universal language programs. Unlike German, which some constituents hoped would constitute the primary language of instruction, advocates for the expansion of the language program in the 1890s and early 1900s expected them to be stand-alone language courses. These new language programs required enrollment thresholds that were not always immediately met.Footnote ¹²⁰ Though the Polish language program failed to meet the necessary 250 students in a particular school in 1896, it was eventually established in 1899. Each subsequent program also required a 250-student enrollment and was only introduced at the level of the individual school rather than at the district level as the German language program had been. Such an expansion into new language offerings was the result of a democratically oriented school board open to meeting the needs of its constituents pragmatically. In addition to Polish, Italian, and French, Spanish was also introduced to the city’s night high school as an “experiment.”Footnote ¹²¹ Perhaps most importantly, the expansion of language instruction reflected Milwaukee’s continued commitment to pluralistic Americanism, which, while not enthusiastically embracing, at least tolerated the linguistic differences that had long defined the city school system.