Ninety-five years ago, Robert Meyer, a teacher at Zion Lutheran Church School near Hampton, was arrested, charged in Hamilton County Court with violating the state’s Siman Act and fined $25. The Act, passed by the Nebraska Legislature a year earlier, in 1919, prohibited all schools, private as well as public, from teaching any subject to any student not yet finished with eighth grade in a language other than English. Meyer was “caught” teaching 10-year-old Raymond Parpart bible stories in German.
This was a time of considerable anti-German sentiment as a result of World War I. Nebraska’s law was like that of 22 other states.
Also in 1920, the Legislature expanded the prohibition to encompass all grades; it was the Reed-Norval Act, the text of which also surfaced as part of a proposed English-only amendment to the State Constitution. Voters approved the amendment by a margin of more than five-to-one at the General Election in 1920. It became Article I, section 27, as follows:
“The English language is hereby declared to be the official language of this state. All official proceedings, records and publications shall be in such language, and the common school branches shall be taught in such language in public, private, denominational and parochial schools.”
Robert Meyer appealed his conviction to the Nebraska Supreme Court, which upheld it. He then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1923, the nation’s highest tribunal issued a 7-2 ruling that reversed the Nebraska courts and overturned the conviction, for the reason that the prohibitive policy of the Siman Act violated parents’ constitutional rights to direct their children’s education.
The ruling in Meyer v. Nebraska became famous and significant.
The ruling made Art. I, sec. 27 of the Nebraska Constitution unenforceable and obsolete as applied to private, parochial and denominational schools.
For a long time, the messiness was ignored; but years later, cleaning it up, by striking the “unconstitutional remnant,” became a recommendation of a state constitutional revision commission, which met between 1995 and 1997.
The commission’s recommendation caused State Senator Elaine Stuhr, from nearby Bradshaw, who not only was familiar with Zion Lutheran Church, but had come to know Raymond Parpart, to introduce Legislative Resolution 20CA in 1999. It proposed to eliminate the English-language requirement; not entirely, but insofar as it applied to private, denominational and parochial schools and had been invalidated by Meyer v. Nebraska.
LR 20CA was passed by the Legislature on a 48-0 vote. It became Amendment 1; the only proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot for the Primary Election of May 9, 2000.
The amendment was decisively rejected by the voters. It lost in all 93 counties. The margin statewide was nearly four-to-one.
Senator Stuhr took up the clean-up cause again two years later. Her LR 1CA, which the Legislature passed 45-1, placed a slightly revised proposal on the ballot for the General Election in November 2002. The electorate said “no” again, although the margin was tighter.
No further attempt to eliminate the obsolete provision has been undertaken. The void wording is the same today as it was placed into the Constitution in 1920.
But there is another part to this story; one a bit more personal for your soon-to-retire columnist.
Two days after the proposed constitutional amendment was rejected the first time, in May 2000, a member of that constitutional revision commission, Dick Herman, wrote an on-line editorial in which he intimated a totally gratuitous suggestion that some who sponsor and operate parochial schools might have had something to do with the outcome. He ascribed a motive of schools wanting to stay firmly perceived as no different than public schools, in order to better argue for governmental aid.
Herman also was a former editorialist with Lincoln’s daily newspaper. He was known in our circles as thriving on portraying Catholic leaders as suspect actors, with sinister motives on most public-policy issues, especially those relating to education and parents’ rights.
In any event, your columnist deemed it necessary—rightly or wrongly, wisely or not—to assure Senator Stuhr that Herman’s subtle suggestion was ludicrous. I wrote this to her:
“It has come to my attention that Dick Herman has written a commentary that suggests that the Catholic Church may have organized action to defeat proposed Amendment 1, in order to (somehow) bolster efforts to obtain public assistance for our schoolchildren. That gratuitous charge is absolute nonsense. I can assure you that Catholic leaders, including Catholic-school administrators, organized nothing, said nothing and did nothing with respect to Amendment 1.
“It should be clear that most Nebraska voters did not fully understand the background and purpose of the proposition, no doubt due in part to the inadequacy of the Statement of Explanation presented on the ballot. (It used the word ‘exempt’ in describing the effect on other-than-public schools.) That explanation, in my opinion, gave the impression that private and parochial schools would be given a new advantage or an opportunity that public schools would not have. Indeed, this very well could have been a vote against special treatment for parochial schools, but not on the basis of Dick Herman’s ludicrous conspiracy theory.”
“We do not want there to be any misunderstanding based on something Dick Herman writes. Thank you.”
Ah, history.
