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This article is about the rise and fall of the National Catholic Community Houses, institutions created by the National Catholic War Council (NCWC) and run by Catholic laywomen. It explores how Catholic laywomen sought to take advantage of the opportunities the post World War I era offered to create viable national institutions, and the forces outside and within their church that undermined their efforts. They faced three interrelated problems that ultimately caused the project to fail. First, while the bishops and priests of the NCWC did willingly support the creation of women-run institutions, they stopped far short of the idea of making them women-controlled institutions. Second, although the women who ran the houses had ambitions that they would take their place as equals in the world of social work, their defensive attitudes undermined their efforts to build useful networks with both non-Catholic social workers and Catholic women religious who had far greater experience in the field. Finally, Catholic laywomen struggled to run these national institutions within local dioceses and parishes where priests and bishops aggressively protected their territory. The combination of these factors meant that Catholic laywomen who ran the National Catholic Community Houses were continually running into stone walls.

In May of 1896, Richard Bartholdt, a Republican from Missouri and a German immigrant, stood on the floor of the House of Representatives and introduced a bill that would set off months of debate in the Fifty-Fourth Congress. The bill was H.R. 7864, which required all male immigrants between the ages of sixteen and sixty to prove they were literate in either English or some other language. While congressmen on all sides of the issue made passionate arguments for and against this bill, they nevertheless found some areas of agreement. The supporters and opponents of restriction all regarded southern and eastern European immigrants as racially different than those of northwestern European descent. Further, all congressmen understood the purpose of the bill to be as much about improving the United States citizenry racially as intellectually. Richard Bartholdt clearly stated the racial reasoning behind the literacy test when he introduced the bill to the House.

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