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On April Fools’ Day in 1919, Maine Gov. Carl Milliken signed a law banning the use of French in public schools — except during formal language instruction. It was no prank.
It was one of the most overtly racist and culturally repressive laws ever enacted in this country: a targeted effort to silence French-speaking Catholics and erase their presence from public life. Milliken’s law wasn’t created in a vacuum. It marked the culmination of decades of anti-French Catholic sentiment dating back to the 1850s, when waves of Québécois and Acadian immigrants settled in Maine’s mill towns and rural north.
Greg Jalbert is a native of Fort Kent. He currently lives in Evergreen, Colorado. A Southern Maine newspaper editor, visiting the St.
John Valley in the late 1850s, expressed the condescension and prejudice of the era: “They are generally ignorant and unambitious ...
a peculiar people, distinct in tastes, habits and aspirations from the Anglo-Saxon race.” This wasn’t idle bias — it became state policy. Editorial boards across Maine, and even the New York Times, called for “forced Americanization,” painting French Catholics as an existential threat.
There were even wild rumors of armed uprisings and a French-led annexation of Maine by Québec. These imagined fears helped ignite one of the darkest chapters in our state’s history: the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. By 1925, Klan membership in Maine exceeded 150,000 — one of the highest per-capita rates in the country.
Klan-backed campaigns targeted French-speaking teachers, Catholic officeholders and parish-centered communities. They demanded loyalty oaths, voter restrictions and laws that would further isolate French Catholic families. The 1919 law launched the era of silent schoolyards.
Children who spoke French — the language of their homes, churches and communities — were humiliated, punished and told they were less American. Many returned home ashamed, and slowly, the language of their ancestors faded. Not just from classrooms, but from kitchen tables and family lore.
What was lost wasn’t only language — it was identity, history and pride. Though the law was repealed decades later, the trauma lingered. We still feel its legacy today.
In 2020, Sen. Susan Collins declared, “I do not believe systemic racism is a problem in the state of Maine.” But the historical record — and the lived experience of generations of Franco-American families — tells a different story.
A story of exclusion. A story of state-sanctioned repression. I now live in Colorado but was raised in Fort Kent, where French once flowed freely in shops, restaurants, churches and ballfields.
In my father’s law office, more than 75% of client conversations were conducted in French. That world is vanishing — not by choice but by design. We owe it to our ancestors who endured this cultural trauma to speak their truth.
They did not forget their stories — they were forced into silence. Remembering that is a form of justice. The cruel irony of April Fools’ Day should not be lost on us.
Milliken’s law was no joke — it was a calculated act of cultural extermination. If Maine is serious about welcoming immigrants and celebrating diversity today, we must first acknowledge this legacy. Not with laughter, but with honesty.
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