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

the same language with themselves and professing the same faith.” Too often, he said, immigrant children were “deprived of the advantages of our system of public education in consequence of the prejudices arising from difference of language or religion.” 27
    Seward’s proposed solution was, in essence, precisely the way the British government responded to Catholic dissatisfaction with the Kildare Place Society schools. If it worked in Ireland, Seward may have figured, it could work in New York. This revolutionary concession to Irish-Catholic concerns came not from Tammany but from Seward’s Whig Party.
    Catholic leaders wasted little time in applying for public funding from the city’s Common Council. The Public School Society, sensing a threat to its monopoly control over education, moved with equal alacrity, joining with some of the city’s leading Protestant clergymen in pleading with members of the Common Council, each of whom served as an ex officio member of the PSS, to put aside the Catholic petition.
    The city’s political leaders must have noticed that Catholic leaders were not entirely united behind Seward’s proposal. The Catholic Register, the voice of the Catholic hierarchy in New York, favored Seward’s plan, arguing that public schools already were sectarian, so Catholic schools were as deserving of public money as Protestant schools disguised as nonsectarian. But another Catholic journal, the Truth Teller , opposed the acceptance of public money for Catholic schools—mainly, it seems, because they were suspicious of Seward and his fellow Whigs. The Catholic community appeared to be divided, powerless, and, perhaps worst of all, disorderly. The Board of Assistant Aldermen overwhelmingly rejected the Catholic petition for government funds, voting 16–1 against the proposal.
    “Dagger John” Hughes returned to New York from Ireland shortly after the vote. The bishop was quick to notice that his flock had not spoken with one voice on this critical issue. That would not do. Order was soon restored. He wrote directly to the governor, who soon became a personal friend as well as a political ally. “My people are divided,” he wrote, “and my Sacred Office requires that I should be a father to all.” 28
    Hughes’s strategy for achieving unity among the city’s approximately seventy thousand Catholics soon became clear—he would not cooperate with the Public School Society. In his view, the PSS was no different from the sectarian organizations that had dominated Irish education until fierce Catholic resistance broke their power. John Hughes had definite ideas about the issues he and his fellow Irish-Catholic immigrants faced in New York. They might have sailed three thousand miles from their homeland, but the enemy hadn’t changed—the enemy still was the moralizing reformer, the civic elitist, the high-church Protestant who believed that Catholics had to shed their superstitions and their cultural identity before they could be politically and socially redeemed. “We are, in truth, placed in the same situation as the Catholics were by the Kildare [Place] Society in Ireland,” Hughes told his fellow New York Irish in 1841. 29
    In the face of such hostility, order and discipline were all-important—the Irish knew that better than most. Their songs and poetry were filled with laments for rebellions lost and lives snuffed out because of treachery, bad luck, confusion, disorder in the face of the enemy. Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out that the principle of boss rule under the Irish, whether in politics or in the Catholic Church, “was not tyranny, but order.” Bishop Hughes once wrote that he wanted Catholics “to become educated, and as a consequence, orderly.” 30
    Members of the Public School Society asked for a meeting with Hughes to discuss revisions of the offending textbooks. Hughes curtly replied that he was too busy—his “many and incessant duties” left him with no