Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics by Terry Golway Read Free Book Online Page A

narrow. The noted writer and Catholic convert Orestes Brownson, a contemporary of Hughes, complained of the bishop’s “habit of taking practical views of all questions.” 24
    O’Connell, too, was a pragmatist, but both he and Hughes shared an unshakable conviction about the righteousness of Catholic claims to civil and political equality in the Anglo-Protestant world. Both men, operating on opposite sides of the Atlantic, saw Anglo-Protestant evangelicalism as a threat to Irish-Catholic culture, values, and identity. The greatest threat of all came in the form of schools that claimed to be nonsectarian but, in their view, subtly undermined the faith of Irish-Catholic children.
    The two men discussed O’Connell’s views of American slavery—he was one of the Atlantic world’s most formidable abolitionists, to the dismay of some Irish-Americans—and an attack on O’Connell’s wife printed in the New York Herald . If they discussed their mutual interest in Catholic education and their mutual suspicion of public schools, Hughes made no record of it in his letters back to New York. But after leaving O’Connell, Hughes traveled to Ireland and saw firsthand the tremendous growth of Catholic schools in the years since O’Connell’s election to Parliament. The Kildare Place Society and other Protestant-dominated school societies collapsed after Catholics broke the Protestant monopoly on public office, replaced by a system of government-funded schools that were under the effective control of local clergy. Hughes concluded, perhaps not surprisingly, that the schools were well run and worthy of emulation. He had never seen “such order” in a classroom, he wrote. 25
    Hughes’s trip to Ireland and his visit with O’Connell could not have been more timely, for when the bishop returned to New York in July 1840, he found his fellow Catholics embroiled in a bitter political controversy over culture, identity, and education, a controversy that would have sounded so very familiar to the transatlantic traveler.
    . . .
    In early 1840, Governor William Seward of New York saw a political opportunity. He believed that he and his fellow Whigs could make inroads with New York City’s growing immigrant community on an issue that was dividing newcomers as well as natives: public education. Democrats in Tammany Hall had been straddling the issue, unsure where the debate might lead. Seward knew that thousands of Catholic children remained outside of the public school system, their parents suspicious of the Public School Society, the private, theoretically nonsectarian organization that ran the schools. The society’s trustees may have been sincere, but their notion of nonsectarian education was imbued with Protestant assumptions and attitudes, as evident in their selection of the King James Bible for students’ lessons. Textbooks contained disparaging phrases about Catholics—a geography text, for example, asserted that “superstition prevails not only at Rome but in all the states of the Church.” Children were taught Protestant hymns and prayers. Textbooks routinely referred to Catholics as “papists,” a derogatory term especially popular among Irish Protestants. Another book warned that if Irish immigration continued, “our country might be appropriately styled the common sewer of Ireland.” 26
    For Irish Catholics with memories of religious oppression in Ireland, the presence of Protestantism in public schools, even in generic form, conveyed cultural disrespect. Catholic New Yorkers demanded in vain that their children be allowed to read from the Douay Bible, which included notes and commentary to help interpret the readings, but the Public School Society refused. Governor Seward, a political rarity in that he was an opponent of slavery who also sympathized with the plight of the Irish, proposed the establishment of publicly funded schools in which the “children of foreigners . . . may be instructed by teachers speaking