Blaine Amendment

The Blaine Amendment was proposed in 1875 by James G. Blaine, Republican Congressman from Maine and future presidential candidate. It was an amendment to the federal Constitution that would forbid the public funding of private, denominational schools while at the same time require Bible reading in the public schools. It passed the House by a vote of 180 yeas and only 7 nays, but failed in the Senate to obtain the required 2/3 margin for a Constitutional amendment by four votes and never became law. The Blaine amendment became pivotal in state debates on the role of religion in public education, religious establishment, and religious expression for the next thirty-five years. Read (2004) examines the role of the GOP in creating a series of state public school systems in the North and West that were strongly shaped by Protestantism. To achieve this goal, Republicans supported amendments, legislation, and regulation in both national and state governments. In the South Bourbon Democrats drafted and ratified constitutions which restricted public funding of denominational schools to keep blacks and poor whites from access to education and the polling place. By 1911, only Maine, Vermont, and Maryland did not have a Blaine amendment in their state constitutions. Read argues that the profound national changes brought about by the Civil War, the difficulties of Reconstruction, modern ideas, industrialization, and millennial religious revivalism brought about a widespread conservative reaction to the millions of immigrants who came to America in the nineteenth century.

Because the majority of these immigrants were Roman Catholic, the newcomers challenged traditional Protestant American religious, social, and republican values. Moreover, they affected the issues of religious establishment and expression in both public and parochial schools. As pietistic Protestants found their political power challenged by these newcomers, they sought to preserve their dominance through legislation promoted largely by the Republican Party to create a Protestant civil religion in America. The moderate, legislation-based nativism of the Republican Party's late nineteenth-century educational policies served as a transition from the belligerent nativism before the Civil War to the pervasive xenophobia of the 1920s.

See also

• Nativism
• Third Party System
• Third Great Awakening

Bibliography

• Green, Steven K. "The Blaine Amendment Reconsidered," The American Journal of Legal History, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Jan., 1992), pp. 38-69 in JSTOR
• Read, Margery. "The Blaine Amendment and the Legislation It Engendered: Nativism and Civil Religion in the Late Nineteenth Century." PhD dissertation U. of Maine 2004. 248 pp. DAI 2005 66(1): 314-A. DA3159835

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