The efforts of the church and Catholic politicians to undermine public schools were quite real, as Florence Kelley discovered in Chicago. Despite a state compulsory education law, in 1892 there were 2,957 seats available for 6,976 schoolchildren in Chicago’s nineteenth ward. Kelley led a campaign for new schools, which was fought tooth and nail by Alderman John Powers, an Irish Catholic who opposed public education and sought to promote parochial schools.
