ABSTRACT
On November 7, 1922, the voters of Oregon approved an initiative petition requiring all children between the ages of eight and sixteen to attend public school. The only exceptions were to be children who were mentally or physically unfit, or who had completed the eighth grade, or who lived more than a certain distance from school, or who with the written permission of the county superintendent of schools received private instruction from a parent or private teacher. The Oregon Law was also in part a product of religious prejudice, but patriotic fervor, accentuated by the war experience, was perhaps equally basic. Initially, this sentiment had been manifested in the enactment of legislation in more than twenty states requiring that the English language alone be the medium of instruction in schools. In the late nineteenth century, anti-parochial school measures had frequently been sponsored by the Republican Party.
