The Blaine Amendment was a failed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have prohibited direct government aid to educational institutions that have a religious affiliation. Most state constitutions already had such provisions, and thirty-eight of the fifty states have clauses that prohibit taxpayer funding of religious entities in their state constitutions. The measures were designed to deny government aid to parochial schools, especially those operated by the Catholic Church in locations with large immigrant populations. They emerged from a growing consensus among 19th-century U.S. Protestants that public education must be free from “sectarian” or “denominational” control, while it also reflected nativist tendencies hostile to immigrants. The amendments are generally seen as explicitly anti-Catholic because when they were enacted public schools typically included Protestant prayer, and taught from Protestant bibles, although debates about public funding of sectarian schools predate any significant Catholic immigration to the U.S. Thus, at the time of the Blaine amendments, public schools were not non-sectarian or non-denominational in the modern sense; nor were they completely secular. Proposed federal amendment President Ulysses S. Grant (1869–77) in a speech in 1875 to a veterans' meeting, called for a Constitutional amendment that would mandate free public schools and prohibit the use of public money for sectarian schools. He was echoing nativist sentiments that were strong in his Republican Party. Grant laid out his agenda for "good common school education." He attacked government support for "sectarian schools" run by religious organizations, and called for the defense of public education "unmixed with sectarian, pagan or atheistical dogmas." Grant declared that "Church and State" should be "forever separate". "Religion", he said, "should be left to families, churches, and private schools devoid of public funds." After Grant's speech, Republican Congressman James G. Blaine proposed the amendment to the federal Constitution. Blaine, who actively sought Catholic votes when he ran for president in 1884, believed that possibility of hurtful agitation on the school question should be ended. In 1875, the proposed amendment passed by a vote of 180 to 7 in the House of Representatives, but failed by four votes to achieve the necessary two-thirds vote in the United States Senate. It never became federal law. The proposed text was: Amendments to state constitutions Supporters of the proposal then turned their attention to state legislatures, where their efforts met with far greater success. Eventually, all but 12 states (Arkansas, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, New