It’s recess at Cathedral School in Portland, Oregon. Amid the clamor, a first grader with messy black hair climbs haltingly up the slide. At the top, he lifts his hands in jubilation. But his joy is cut short by a ringing bell. The boy plunges down the chute, lands on his feet, and dashes to join the line of uniformed classmates heading for Mass.
This scene is possible today in Oregon — and throughout the United States — because a century ago, the Knights of Columbus teamed up with local church leaders and a community of women religious to save Catholic schools. In 1922, Oregon passed the Compulsory Education Act — a Ku Klux Klan-backed bill that would have required all children between 8 and 16 to attend public schools. The law posed an existential threat to Catholic schools and triggered a nationwide debate over parental rights, religious freedom, and state power.
“No more outrageous blow was ever delivered at a great and patriotic institution — the parochial school — than that delivered in Oregon,” wrote Supreme Knight James Flaherty in the January 1923 issue of Columbia. “It is time for plain speech, for if the parochial school goes, what will happen to all Catholic institutions?”
Backed by the Order’s financial and moral support, the case — Pierce v. Society of Sisters — reached the U.S. Supreme Court in late 1924. On June 1, 1925, the justices unanimously struck down the law, affirming parents’ rights to choose religious or private education for their children.
In 2000, at the case’s 75th anniversary, U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley honored the Knights’ role. The ruling, he said, “paved the way for vigorous private and parochial education” and “empowered parents.”
Indeed, while many have tried to sweep the Pierce victory into the dustbin of history, it has remained a cornerstone of legal arguments for educational and religious freedom for a century.
PREJUDICE AND RESISTANCE
In the years leading up to the Oregon law, a wave of immigration from southern and central Europe had fueled a revival of American nativism. Many new arrivals were Catholic, and their growing presence challenged the dominant Protestant social order. World War I intensified anti-Catholic sentiment, especially as suspicion of German Americans spread to other immigrant communities.
The Ku Klux Klan capitalized on this fear. No longer limited to the South, the Klan rebranded itself as a national defender of “100% Americanism,” growing to nearly 4 million members in the early 1920s. It gained influence in the North and West by portraying Catholics, Jews, and immigrants as threats to national identity.
One Klan pamphlet described southern Europeans as “the scum of the Mediterranean” and “masses of ignorant, superstitious, religious devotees.” The Klan aligned itself with other anti-Catholic fraternal groups — including the Scottish Rite Masons and the Loyal Orange Lodges — and helped elect sympathetic officials in Oklahoma, Indiana, Colorado, Maine, Texas, and Oregon.
The Knights of Columbus stepped up as the Klan’s most consistent and forceful opponent. Through its Commission on Religious Prejudices, the Order exposed false claims — including the fabricated “Bogus Oath” supposedly sworn by Knights — and championed religious liberty through public statements, publications, and lawsuits.
Catholic schools soon became a primary target. While compulsory public education bills failed in several states, Oregon’s relatively weak Catholic infrastructure and strong Klan organization made it vulnerable. Backed by about 14,000 Klansmen and a Klan-endorsed governor, Oregon voters narrowly approved the Compulsory Education Act in November 1922.
The new law required all children ages 8 to 16 to attend public school, effectively outlawing parochial and other private grammar schools. Parents who refused could face jail time or fines.
“The time was too short to overcome the immense tide of anti-Catholic prejudice,” noted a Nov. 9, 1922, editorial in the Catholic Sentinel. In the January 1923 issue of Columbia, Portland Archbishop Alexander Christie further explained, “There were nationwide forces at work behind the local proponents of the bill. They had no hesitancy in declaring that their larger purpose included the suppression of Catholic schools in the whole country.”
Father Edwin O’Hara — a Portland priest and former Knights of Columbus chaplain who had served in France during World War I — became a leading voice against the law. He emphasized the idea that children belong to their parents, not the state. “This principle is older than the Republic,” he wrote. “To deny it is to deny the very foundation of a free society.”
STANDING FOR LIBERTY
The Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, who had operated schools in Oregon since 1859, stepped forward as plaintiffs. They were soon joined by Hill Military Academy, a nonsectarian private school. Together, they mounted a constitutional challenge, hoping to block the law before it took effect in 1926.
Recognizing the high cost of litigation, Archbishop Christie traveled to Chicago in early 1923 to seek help from the Knights of Columbus. “We are at the end of our resources,” he told the Supreme Council. Supreme Knight Flaherty later recalled, “There was only one answer to make. We told His Grace that we were with him to a man.”
The Knights ultimately contributed more than $40,000 — approximately $750,000 in 2025 dollars — in legal aid. But the Order’s support went beyond finances. Through Columbia and publicity efforts, it rallied national attention and helped shape public understanding of the case.
In February 1923, for example, Columbia published a forceful critique by a former Oregon governor, Ben W. Olcott, who had been defeated by a Klan-backed candidate.
“We have seen the injunctions of our forefathers disobeyed; we have seen class arrayed against class; neighbor against neighbor,” he warned. “Are these things to spread, or are they to die under a resurrection of common sense?”
In Portland, J.P. Kavanaugh — a former circuit court judge and member of the Knights — led the Sisters’ legal team. Their argument emphasized that the law unjustly harmed the Sisters’ business enterprise and property, and more broadly, infringed on the rights of parents to direct their children’s education.
In March 1924, a panel of federal judges ruled in favor of the Sisters. On its front page, The New York Times summarized the decision: “[The judges] declared that the law robs parents of their rights, private school teachers of their livelihood and private schools of their property.”
No one rested on their laurels. Oregon’s governor, Walter Pierce, quickly appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the case was renamed Pierce v. Society of Sisters.
The Sisters’ team brought in William Guthrie, a prominent constitutional lawyer and former Columbia University professor. In the June 1924 issue of Columbia, Guthrie called the case “the most dangerous and far-reaching crisis” ever faced by Catholic education in America.
Rather than argue on strictly religious liberty grounds, Guthrie based his case on the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause and principles of natural law. He pointed to the contributions of Catholic schools to society, especially during World War I, and argued that the state had no right to interfere with legitimate private enterprise or parental duty. The strategy worked.
On June 1, 1925, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that Oregon’s law was unconstitutional.
“The child is not the mere creature of the State,” wrote Justice James McReynolds in the unanimous decision. “Those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”
LASTING IMPACT
The Pierce ruling was hailed across the country. Future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter said the decision had “stifled the recrudescence of intolerance” and toppled “the effort to regiment the mental life of Americans.”
At the Sisters’ convent south of Portland, a chronicler recorded the community’s response on June 2: “Our joy is unbounded — it is as if the very floodgates of Heaven had opened and poured out upon the length and breadth of our own United States the refreshing waters of renewal of spirit.”
The Knights, too, celebrated the victory. “Who shall say that to serve God well is to serve our country ill?” wrote Supreme Knight Flaherty in Columbia. “As lovers of liberty and of true American ideals, let us rejoice in this confirmation of our faith in the fair-mindedness and tolerant spirit of the American people, so unmistakenly expressed in the decision of the Supreme Court.”
In the decades that followed, Pierce v. Society of Sisters would be cited in more than 100 Supreme Court opinions. In 1947, it served as precedent in Everson v. Board of Education, allowing public transportation for students at religious schools. In 1950, as Congress debated whether federal funding could aid parochial education, Columbia’s editors noted that the Pierce decision had given a “knock on the head” to the empty notion that public schools are more American than Catholic schools.
The 1958 National Defense Education Act, passed in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik, extended federal funding for science and language instruction to all schools — public and private alike — in a move consistent with Pierce. Later decisions and legislation upheld aid for classrooms and technology in parochial schools.
Jesuit Father Richard Regan, writing in 1993, observed that denying support to private schools effectively removed choice for families without means. And in 2000, Columbia columnist Russell Shaw posed a lasting question in relation to vouchers and school choice: “How solid is a ‘right’ that parents can’t exercise due to economic inequity — specifically, the inequity of concentrating tax-supported resources on public schools to the exclusion of other alternatives?”
While Pierce is a legal touchstone for those defending school choice, religious institutions, and parental rights, it has also been echoed throughout the Order’s broader legacy of religious liberty. Within a year of the Supreme Court’s decision, the Knights mobilized to defend the Church in Mexico, where sweeping anti-clerical laws had outlawed public worship and triggered violent persecution. From its response to atheistic communism — including the addition of the words “under God” to the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance — to its defense of the Little Sisters of the Poor against coercive health mandates, the Order has remained steadfast in upholding conscience rights and protecting the free expression of faith in public life.
Following the June 1925 victory in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, Supreme Knight James Flaherty affirmed, “Let us rejoice that when, in the dark hours of bigotry’s first threatening advance, the victims of a small and prejudiced group sought our aid, they did not seek in vain.” He then added, “May the day never dawn that will find our swords sheathed and idle in any struggle against injustice.”