Читать книгу The American Kaleidoscope - Lawrence H. Fuchs - Страница 14

Chapter Two

“REINFORCEMENTS TO REPUBLICANISM”

Irish Catholic Response to the Civic Culture

ON THE evening of September 12, 1960, before several hundred Protestant ministers and laymen in the Crystal Ballroom of the Rice Hotel in Houston, John F. Kennedy gave the clearest and most eloquent statement ever made by a presidential candidate on religion and politics in American life. A minister who was present reflected that the meeting had had many of the characteristics of an “inquisition.” Although Kennedy was a fourth-generation American, grandson of a mayor of Boston, son of an ambassador to England, and a U.S. senator who had sworn allegiance to the American Constitution, as a Catholic, he had to prove that he was American enough to hold the presidency.

Kennedy had been reassured by his friend John Wright, Catholic bishop of Pittsburgh, that, contrary to public belief, no public act of a president could lead to his excommunication and that he had not, as a Catholic, sworn allegiance to the Pope. “I am not the Catholic candidate for President,” Kennedy told the clergymen, “I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters, and the Church does not speak for me.” When Kennedy was asked by a minister to appeal to Richard Cardinal Cushing to present his views on church and state to the Vatican so that they might become the authorized views of all Roman Catholics in the United States, the candidate replied, “As I do not accept the right of, as I said, any ecclesiastical official to tell me what I should do in the sphere of my public responsibility as an elected official, I do not propose also to ask Cardinal Cushing to ask the Vatican to take some action.” Applause burst from the audience; the minister rose to state his admiration for Kennedy’s courage, but doubted that the senator’s views represented the position of his church. The candidate shot back: “I believe I am stating the viewpoint that Catholics in this country hold toward that happy relationship which exists between church and state.” The minister responded, “Let me ask you, sir, do you state it with the approval of the Vatican?” Kennedy replied, “I don’t have to have approval.”¹

Kennedy shared Jefferson’s view on religious freedom and separation of church and state. Religious freedom had become a main foundation of voluntary pluralism by the 1830s, but its champions had never contemplated a challenge of the magnitude presented by Irish Catholic immigration in the years following the Irish potato blight of 1845–1847. Several of the founders of the new republic who believed so strongly in religious freedom for Protestants held deep and persistent anti-Catholic prejudices. Only thirty years before the Declaration of Independence and twenty-seven years before the passage of the Virginia Statute to Disestablish the Anglican Religion, Virginia’s House of Burgesses prevented Catholics from acting as guardians, or serving as witnesses, congregating in large groups, carrying arms, or even keeping a horse valued at more than five pounds.² Fear of Catholicism was so great that when Great Britain passed the Quebec Act in 1774 extending toleration to Catholics in Quebec and to French settlers of the Ohio Valley, Alexander Hamilton complained that the English threatened New York with Popery.

The anti-Catholic sentiments of such republicans as John Jay, Patrick Henry, and John Adams were bolstered by the opposition of the Church in Europe to movements for self-government. Jay was astonished that “a British Parliament should ever consent to establish in that country [Canada] a religion that has deluged your island in blood and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder and rebellion throughout every part of the world.”³ In South Carolina, an effigy of the Pope was burned in a bonfire fueled with English tea leaves; in Maryland, a double land tax was levied on Catholics. Boston (where Paul Revere produced anti-Catholic engravings) and other American towns revived the American holiday “Pope Day,” which featured a large parade that ended in the burning of an effigy of the Pope.⁴

On the eve of the Revolution, Catholics, small in number, were easy to assimilate, according to Crèvecoeur. Writing about life on the New York frontier perhaps only a year or two before Jay’s fulminations against the Quebec Act, he saw “strict modes of Christianity” abandoned because each man, preoccupied with his own land, horses, and produce, lost interest in pushing his religious views on others. “How does it concern the welfare of the country, or of the provinces at large, what this man’s religious sentiments are, or really whether he has any religion at all?” asked Crèvecoeur in a query similar to Jefferson’s remark a few years later that it neither picked his pocket nor broke his leg if his neighbors worshiped twenty gods or no god.⁵ Confidently predicting that religious indifference and tolerance would grow from generation to generation, Crèvecoeur did not foresee the immigration of huge numbers of Irish Catholics to the growing cities of America.

Crèvecoeur’s prediction held for about forty years. Although public celebrations on behalf of freedom preceding and during the Revolution often included diatribes against the Pope, the virtually unanimous support that the small number of American Catholic leaders gave to the cause of independence and the assistance of France against England inhibited anti-Catholic attacks. The practical requirements of organizing an insurrection and then a revolution also undermined anti-Catholicism. The same First Continental Congress that resented the Quebec Act invited the Quebecois to join with them in fighting the British. Later, Benjamin Franklin, who attempted to involve the Quebecois with the Continental Army, visited Ireland to cultivate the friendship of leaders of the fight for Catholic emancipation there and persuaded Congress to send a message of solidarity to Catholics in Ireland. The Revolutionary leaders were practical men who wanted to win their independence; they had no trouble accepting the help of France, one of the most Catholic nations in Europe.

After the war, American patriots no longer warned that Jesuits were the advance agents of the Pope and conspiring to destroy American liberties; now they denounced the Loyalist newspapers that reflected anxieties born of vanished privileges and status.⁶ Although seven state constitutions forbade Catholics to hold office, the federal Constitution (two Catholics were among the signers) prohibited imposition of any religious test of officeholders in the new government, and the First Amendment made it unconstitutional for Congress to make any law “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Numbering only about 35,000 in 1790, Catholics were not seen as a potential problem in the new nation even while Catholicism itself was often denounced.⁷

Guarding the Civic Culture: What to Do About Catholic Immigration

By 1820 there were 200,000 Catholics in the U.S. Hostility arose, particularly after the first provincial council of Catholic bishops in 1829 urged the establishment of Catholic schools in each community to be supported by public funds as were the secular common schools, and as unemployment in Ireland stimulated the exodus of slightly more than 200,000 immigrants to the U.S. during the decade of the 1830s. Exhortations to Catholics by Protestant ministers to read the Protestant Bible, to discover the Gospel, and to witness for Christ were frequently linked to attacks on the papacy as a symbol of tyrannical power.

From the perspective of Protestant militants, the Roman Catholic church was an enemy of freedom because it did not accept churches as voluntary associations or the idea that an individual encounter with God without the intervention of priests and sacraments was the way to salvation. The Catholic church could not claim to be free from the authority and dictation of foreigners who were seen as enemies of personal liberty and of the institutions that had been designed to protect and extend it.

Yet, Tocqueville wrote of religious peace in the United States in 1833 and, from a European perspective, he was largely right. In 1835, Roger Taney, a devout Roman Catholic, was appointed and confirmed as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. But the general religious harmony of the 1830s was marred by incidents in Philadelphia and in other cities and would be shattered in the next two decades when the potato blight of 1845–1847 left hundreds of thousands dead or starving in Ireland. The number of immigrants jumped from 200,000 in the 1830s to 781,000 in the 1840s and 914,000 in the following decade. The vast majority would not even have qualified as immigrants in the 1980s, on several grounds—poverty, illness, and no family relations. But the mid-nineteenth century American appetite for settlers and laborers was insatiable.

Most Irish crowded into wretched tenements in the cities or shacks in the marshlands or outlying districts, and were frequently plagued by disease and drink. Many entered almshouses, mental institutions, and prisons (by mid-century, more than half of the criminal offenses recorded in the U.S. were committed by immigrants, mostly by the Irish). Often willing to work at hauling heavy loads, cleaning stables, and sweeping streets for wages lower than those acceptable to many native-born Americans, they would have provoked the antagonism of poor, unskilled native workers even if they had not practiced a “foreign” religion with its statues, crucifixes, and ornate vestments.

There was street fighting in several cities between poor Catholics and Protestants in the 1830s and 1840s, burning of churches, and stoning of houses. But cheap labor was badly needed to work in the factories and mines, to build the bridges and roads, and to serve as domestics in the homes of the affluent. If upper- and upper-middle-class Whigs wanted the Irish to do the dirty jobs, leaders of the Democratic party wanted their votes. The Democratic platforms of 1840, 1844, 1848, and 1852, employing the language of the civic culture, praised “the liberal principles embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence and sanctioned in the Constitution, which makes ours the land of liberty, and the asylum of the oppressed of every nation” in opposition to nativist efforts to lengthen the waiting time of newcomers for naturalization and to restrict their privileges as citizens.⁸

By 1850, the Irish constituted 42 percent of the foreign-born population in the U.S. The Catholic population reached two million. One thousand priests served nearly fifteen hundred churches and Mass stations, ruled by a hierarchy of thirty-five bishops, mostly Irish; the Irish became a target of Anglo-American Protestant attacks. Anti-Catholic agitation between 1830 and 1850 was based on a mixture of xenophobic, sectarian, and economic, as well as ideological fears, but it was often couched in patriotic slogans about the defense of Americanism. “They come here ignorant and poor, without a knowledge of our institutions,” intoned The New England Magazine in 1834.⁹ A U.S. House of Representatives Report in 1838, speaking of the new Irish immigrants, insisted, “The character of our free institutions was not adapted for such citizens; nor did the framers of those institutions contemplate the nature and mental character of the bulk of those who have since blotted our country.”¹⁰

Some of the Americanizers were confident that even though the Irish belonged to a church that seemed idolatrous and were used to servile dependence, they could adapt to American society if given the opportunity. A Dartmouth professor speaking before the 1841 annual meeting of the New England Society (a fraternal, charitable organization open to native-born New Englanders or their sons resident in New York) argued that the “common institutions of government and education” in the U.S. created a uniform national character that obliterated differences of class, region, and even religion.¹¹ The common culture—he did not call it the “civic culture”—would make immigrants into Americans. But others were just as certain that the avarice of employers for cheap laborers and the lust of Democratic party leaders for servile followers threatened the foundations of the American republic.

The American inventor and painter, and the first president of the National Academy of Arts and Design, Samuel F. B. Morse, tried to sound an alarm in 1835 with a pamphlet, Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States Through Foreign Immigration, that pointed to the immigration of Catholics as a dire threat to free institutions. He reminded readers of Jefferson’s worry that foreigners would bring foreign principles of government with them and might render American legislation into “a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”¹² In days past, immigration had not been threatening, argued Morse, because immigrants had come “from the ranks of the learned and the good, from the enlightened mechanic and artisan, and intelligent husbandmen.” Forgetting the large numbers of paupers and convicts who had emigrated from Europe throughout the seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries, Morse maintained that Europe had sent “real lovers of liberty, to the benefit of America.” But “now,” Morse claimed, “emigrants are selected for a service to their tyrants, and by their tyrants, not for their affinity to liberty, but for their mental servitude, and their docility in obeying the orders of their priests.”¹³

It was an argument that spurred the rise of the native American movement, whose leaders called for a long residency requirement for immigrants before naturalization. Some proposed a constitutional amendment to keep naturalized citizens from holding office. Still, few nativists argued that immigration should be stopped altogether. Immigrants were needed as workers. The principal goal of the Americanists was to allow the Irish full citizenship only when they were ready to participate in a republican form of government. One member of Congress, a representative of the American Republican (nativist) party from Pennsylvania, urged that “we be faithful to our own creed of freedom, … by asking that the alien shall be naturalized in mind, in heart, in soul, by a residence sufficiently long to wean him from his first love, and engraft on his understanding the knowledge that dignifies a free man.”¹⁴ The problem, from the nativist point of view, was, in Morse’s words, “that popery is opposed in its very nature to Democratic Republicanism; and it is, therefore, as a political system, as well as a religious, opposed to civil and religious liberty and consequently to our form of government.”¹⁵

Many Americans were appalled when Monsignor Gaetano Bedini, who had helped squelch the uprisings of 1848 and 1849 in Italy and who was associated with the resurgence of monarchy there, was sent to settle a controversy within the Catholic communities of Buffalo and Philadelphia on whether church property should be legally held in trusteeship by the laity or, as Rome directed, by the clergy. Here was Bedini, an official of the Roman Catholic church, telling American citizens what they should do. He was burned in effigy in Boston and Baltimore, manhandled as he entered the bishop’s carriage in Pittsburgh, and saved from possible assassination in Wheeling, West Virginia, only by quick action of several hundred armed Irishmen who guarded him and the churches of the city.¹⁶

The Americanist movement of the 1840s and 1850s was fueled not just by fear of Rome but also by the separatism of the church, which established Catholic parochial schools to guard the young and keep them faithful. One political response to the growing numbers of Catholics was the formation of a Nativist party, which in New York City published a newspaper entitled Spirit of Seventy-Six; it elected a mayor and the entire common council of New York City in 1837. It led, in turn, to the American Republican party, which was swept into office in the city in 1844 on an explicitly anti-Catholic platform,¹⁷ and established branches in every county in New York State and New Jersey and in the cities of Boston and Charleston, South Carolina. The American Republicans changed their name to the Native American party and embraced a program of positive reform as well as antiforeignism and anti-Catholicism.

In the 1850s, the Know-Nothing party, the only xenophobic, nativist party to win substantial power in national and state elections, was organized. It was officially called The Order of the Star-Spangled Banner and appeared on the ballot as the American Party.¹⁸ Believing that Catholicism was a foreign conspiracy bent on destroying American institutions, its members were sworn to exclude all immigrants “and Roman Catholics in particular” from places of trust, profit, or honor. No one who was a Catholic or even married to one could join.¹⁹

Americanists intended to guard the gates of republicanism by having the newcomers wait twenty-one years before becoming eligible for naturalization and by placing an absolute bar against their holding public office.²⁰ The success of their appeal was phenomenal, and in the state legislative elections of 1854 the new party carried Massachusetts, Delaware, and, in alliance with the Whigs, Pennsylvania.²¹ In Massachusetts, the governor and all state officers were Know-Nothings, as was the state senate and all but two of 378 members of the state house of representatives. In the fall election, about seventy-five party members were elected to Congress, and in the next year, major state offices in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut were won by nativists.²² By 1856, seven governors, eight U.S. senators, and 104 members of the U.S. House of Representatives who campaigned on the American Party platform were elected. Talk of a Know-Nothing president became commonplace.

Most leaders of the Democratic party itself resisted anti-Catholic hysteria and made a strong appeal for immigrant support. The party platform in 1856, faithful to the Pennsylvania idea of American nationality, insisted that “no party can justly be deemed national, Constitutional, or in accordance with American principles which bases its exclusive organization upon religious opinions and accidental birthplace.” Opposing what it called a “crusade … against Catholics and foreign born,” the platform denounced it as not “in unison with the spirit of toleration and enlarged freedom which peculiarly distinguishes the American system of popular government.”²³

The platform was right and wrong. The Pennsylvania approach of “toleration and enlarged freedom” was an important feature of American life in the 1850s. But Massachusetts disbanded Irish military companies and kept the Irish from the police force and state agencies, an approach of those who believed they were protecting republicanism. But even in Massachusetts, no action was taken to restrict the voting of immigrants, as many Know-Nothing leaders had demanded. The militant attacks of the Americanists had diminishing appeal to politicians, especially in states where a growing number of newcomers voted. But the most important reason for the demise of the American Party was the rise of a wrenching debate over slavery.

Millard Fillmore, American Party nominee for the presidency in 1856, was viewed in the North as a champion of slavery. He had signed the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 as president. New England nativists, perhaps discouraged by the excesses of some leaders, were disgusted by the nomination of Fillmore, and although the American Party polled about 25 percent of the votes nationally, it won a majority only in Maryland. As the conflict over slavery intensified, religious passions and the debate over the period of residency required for aliens to become citizens receded; the American Party disappeared, and with it the issue of a religious test for membership in the American polity.

The urban Irish opposed the cause of abolition; Irish rioted against the draft law in New York City in July 1863, and rumors arose of papal conspiracy to destroy republican government. But these were largely forgotten as the Civil War ended. More likely to be remembered were the heroes of General Thomas Meagher’s Irish Brigade, two-thirds of whom had been killed in the battle of Fredericksburg, and the thousands of Catholic soldiers who fought in the Union Army. Americans hardly noticed when Pope Pius IX in 1864 issued a series of eighty propositions as the Syllabus of Errors, among them the “error” that “the Pope may and must reconcile himself and adapt himself to progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.”²⁴ In later decades, anti-Catholicism would surface again in a national movement in the form of the American Protective Association and the Ku Klux Klan.

The Irish Response: Americanization Through Politics

The Irish were well on their way toward becoming Irish-Americans just as the Germans were becoming German-Americans, even though, unlike the Germans, they were overwhelmingly poor and suffered from high rates of family separation, crime, and disease. The story of the Americanization of Irish Catholics is without parallel, not just because of their desperate economic circumstances but because the civic culture of the Americans was formed to such a large extent on the basis of principles antithetical to Irish Catholic culture in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Altogether, about nine million Irish immigrants came to the United States, nine-tenths of them of Roman Catholic background.²⁵ They provided a severe test of the capacity of the civic culture to permit and sanction voluntary pluralism while unifying newcomers around republican principles. Most of the Irish did not speak a foreign language, but they might just as well have, so suspect were their strange habits, manners, and authoritarian religion. Yet, they proved that it was possible for immigrant-ethnic groups to retain separate communal, cultural, and educational institutions even as they participated increasingly in the nation’s wider economic and political life.

If language had been the principal political issue for the Germans, Catholic education was the Irish issue. Even before the great famine migrations, when there were relatively few Irish Catholics in the U.S., the Catholic church pressed the issue of Protestant influence in the schools, although its only power at the time lay in the votes of naturalized immigrants and, later, of their children. In an important political struggle in New York City in the late 1830s, the Irish pressed their sectarian interests, not only becoming more Americanized in the process but also strengthening one of the most important principles of the civic culture, the separation of church and state. Catholics in New York objected because a Protestant sectarian organization, the Public School Society, ran the common schools of the city and used books with an anti-Catholic slant. When, in 1840, Catholics petitioned for a share of the school funds to support their own sectarian schools, Protestants successfully rebuffed their efforts through both the Whig and Democratic parties. Many Protestants saw in the Catholic opposition to the common schools an unwillingness to let their children become Americanized.²⁶

In this struggle, unable to win sufficient support from the major parties, Bishop John Hughes led Irish Catholics in advancing Catholic nominees independent of the established political parties, for three assembly seats and two for the state senate. Catholics pressed their case on the ground of equal rights. When a large crowd assembled on October 29, 1840, they came, as their advertisement said, as “the friends of civil and religious freedom.”²⁷ When Bishop Hughes urged his listeners to use politics to protect their interests, he employed the language of the civic culture: “You now, for the first time, find yourselves in the position to vote at least for yourselves … now you are determined to uphold, with your own votes, your own rights … go, like free men, with dignity and calmness, entertaining due respect for your fellow-citizens and their opinions, and deposit your votes.”²⁸ The chemistry of ethnic Americanization was at work. The Irish organized, petitioned, and voted to get their view across. Although the independent Irish Catholic ticket lost, with only two thousand votes, Catholic votes made the difference between success and defeat for the ten Democratic candidates for assembly whom Catholics endorsed. Irish Catholics had demonstrated to Tammany Hall, New York City’s Democratic organization, that it needed Catholic support to win. Upstate New York Democrats were impressed when Hughes presented a petition to the legislature bearing the names of thirteen thousand Catholics in support of a bill to put New York schools under the jurisdiction of the state rather than the Public School Society.²⁹ Funds were not authorized by the legislature for parochial schools, but in the next election New York City Catholics put up their own candidates for mayor and the common council. Although not elected, they presented a threat to the Democrats, whose state leaders pressured the legislature to establish, for the first time, a school system directly controlled by the people and entirely financed from the public treasury—a full public school system—in what was a major victory for the separation of church and state.

The outcome had vast implications for the evolution of voluntary pluralism. While the New York legislature had voted not to subsidize Irish Catholic parochial schools, it did agree to try to remove the Protestant influence from the public schools, and, by 1844, Bible reading was excluded from thirty-one of the city’s public schools.³⁰ There was nothing to stop the Irish or other national Catholic groups from establishing their own parochial schools if they would pay for them.

Irish Catholics had set a precedent for other ethnic-religious groups: negotiate, bargain, and work within the system. Effective in endorsing Democratic candidates but relatively ineffective in advancing an independent Catholic party, they inadvertently established a presumption against presenting an explicitly religious or ethnic slate in future elections. Claiming American values and institutions as their own and employing the rhetoric of the civic culture, Irish Catholics illustrated Tocqueville’s proposition that patriotism is nurtured and reinforced by participation in the political process.

Irish Catholics had known politics in the old country, where the rules were rigged against them. In the U.S., where every vote was equal, sheer numbers counted most. The Democratic party’s appeal was primarily to those trying to acquire property and status. It was the natural home for the Irish, although in Philadelphia Irish building contractors were tied into the Republican machine. The most strident anti-Catholics were found overwhelmingly among the Know-Nothings, the Whigs, and factional predecessors of the Republican party. In return for Irish votes, the Democrats of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and dozens of other cities offered jobs in the party, protection against riots, recognition of Irish culture and nationalism, as in the sponsorship of a major Saint Patrick’s Day parade or party, and, as Kirby A. Miller has written, “a sense of belonging to a powerful, American institution.”³¹ Irish political clubs were set up in Irish grog shops and by street gangs and in volunteer fire companies. The use of repeater voters was common among the Irish, who were taught the practice by non-Irish (usually Anglo-American) political leaders, like New York’s Boss Tweed in the 1860s. Politics became a principal route to municipal jobs, and, for those who could be elected to a moderately important office, it meant a decent income and life-style, too. Before the arrival of large numbers of Irish Catholics, Boston was one of the most tranquil, best governed, and most homogeneous cities in the world, with, in 1845, fewer than ten thousand industrial workers in a population of 165,000.³² Class differences existed, of course; blacks, nearly always at the bottom, lived in “nigger hill” behind the State House and in the North End near poor whites, most of whom lived around Fort Hill. But there was little poverty in the city, the crime rate was less than in cities of comparable size, and standards of public health were relatively high. Harriet Martineau, a visitor from England, wrote, “I know no large city where there is so much mutual helpfulness, so little neglect and ignorance of the concerns of other classes.”³³ Then came the famine Irish, and, as Oscar Handlin has shown, they quickly formed an urban proletariat, a laboring class exploited through exorbitant rents for miserable tenement apartments, low wages, and grinding, menial work. Disease and crime followed.

Yankee Protestants were not entirely without sympathy. Yankee doctors treated the Irish victims of the cholera epidemic of 1849, in which five hundred persons perished. Yankee Protestants supported the St. Vincent Female Orphan Asylum, which cared for children who had lost both parents during the epidemic. A Harvard graduate and former Episcopalian minister founded the House of the Angel Guardian in the North End in 1851 as a “moral restaurant” for “intractable” Catholic children who had appeared before municipal court judges and others whose parents and guardians were willing to commit them there.³⁴ But Yankee Boston generally felt outrage, shock, and disdain for the Irish. By the late 1840s and early 1850s the Irish accounted for 97 percent of the residents in the Deer Island almshouse, 75 percent of the prisoners in the county jail, 90 percent of Boston’s truants and vagabonds, and 58 percent of its paupers.³⁵

The Irish themselves, through church and charitable organizations, tried to deal with the survival needs of children growing up in homes headed by women³⁶ and created such charitable institutions as the Working Boys’ Home in the North End and the Carney Hospital, founded by a wealthy Irish merchant, which set aside a ward for abandoned infants and unwed mothers. By the 1870s the Irish “were no longer the illiterate, impoverished peasants who had dragged themselves ashore,”³⁷ but an estimated 22 percent of Irish households in 1870 still struggled in desperate poverty.³⁸ With more than 26 percent of the population in Boston, 24 percent in New York, 25 percent in Jersey City, and 19 percent in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Providence, the Irish Catholics established churches, sodalities, Holy Name societies, and social, athletic, and community organizations connected to the church.³⁹ In addition to the network of parishes and parochial schools, they organized fraternities, labor unions, volunteer fire departments, orphanages, homes for the elderly, and temperance halls. Such organizations provided solace and comfort for immigrants and their children, and often served as bases from which the Irish Catholics could express their interests and make their claims in the polity. The most important communal organization of all for the Irish in Boston, New York, and other cities, next to the church itself, was the Democratic party, and for Irish men, the party probably was more important than the church. In and through the party they found sociability, jobs, and a way to claim an American identity.

The Irish were at least as eager to embrace their new country as the Germans. Even at the height of the Americanist–Know Nothing fervor in 1856, an Irish Catholic immigrant standing on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., recorded his awe at seeing about him “signs of incorruptible liberty.” Writing of the Capitol, he said, “I prayed fervently for its perpetuation and invincibility, as I considered it the shield of the oppressed, the dread of tyrants, and the nucleus of our glorious Constitution [italics mine].”⁴⁰

The Catholic press in the mid-nineteenth century reflected the hunger of the Irish to be accepted as Americans.⁴¹ The first major editor of the leading Catholic newspaper, The Pilot of Boston, Patrick Donahoe, fought to protect Irish Catholics; he urged his readers to become citizens and to get involved in politics.⁴² Speaking very much as Carl Schurz had to the Germans, Donahoe urged the Irish of Boston and the surrounding area not to anglicize their names but to be proud of every aspect of their Irish ancestry even as they gained self-respect by becoming citizens and voting. He saw the immigrants as continual “‘reinforcements to the principle of our republicanism’ with ‘a strong hatred of monarchy’ and a ‘natural love for this sheltering democracy.’”⁴³

It was advice followed by a succession of Boston politicians. The first great South Boston Irish politician, Patrick Collins, found (in Victor Greene’s phrase) “that America offered a universal ideology that he and his countrymen could share.”⁴⁴ So strong was Collins’s Irish identity that he joined the Fenian Brotherhood, the Irish-American revolutionary organization, although he did not accompany them in their raid into Canada, reasoning that immigrants should not fight in wars that had not been declared by Congress. An Irish nationalist, he was also an active Democratic party politician, preaching what he called the “genius of republicanism” to all who would listen.⁴⁵

Collins did not hold elective office in Boston (President Cleveland appointed him consul-general in London in 1892), but Hugh O’Brien, John Fitzgerald, and James Michael Curley did. The nativists of the 1850s had warned that one day the Bridgets and Patricks down below in the kitchen would rule the city of Boston, but there had been only one Irish policeman in the entire city before the Civil War. By 1869, there were nearly forty. In 1871, there were forty-five, and by 1900, one hundred.⁴⁶ In the prewar years there had never been an Irishman on Boston’s eightman board of aldermen and only one on the forty-eight-person common council. By 1870, there were a half dozen on the common council and one alderman.

In 1884, the Irish-born Hugh O’Brien was elected Mayor of Boston; he was reelected for four consecutive terms. Since he could win only with Yankee votes, he was careful not to identify too strongly with his Irish constituents, although later he made an occasional gesture, such as shutting down the Boston public library on St. Patrick’s Day.

By 1906, when John Fitzgerald was elected mayor, all of the major political bosses of the city were Irish, and many Irish-Americans ran for city and state office. “Honey Fitz,” as he was called, had no reticence in making strong local ethnic appeals and attacking his opponents as tools of the merchants of Boston. If O’Brien had been a conservative and dependable Irishman, someone the Brahmins could use to broker their interests, Fitzgerald was outrageously Irish. Before his election as mayor, he was sent to Congress, one of three Catholics in the national legislative body.⁴⁷ As mayor he became a champion not of the poor Irish alone, but of an increasing number of Jewish and Italian immigrants for whom, when in Congress, he had opposed immigration restriction. Opposed by the Brahmin Good Government Association, he was turned out of office in 1907, but he won again in 1910, despite denunciations of the “evils of Fitzgeraldism.”⁴⁸ Fitzgerald’s oldest daughter, Rose, married Joseph Patrick Kennedy, the son of another of Boston’s political bosses, Patrick J. Kennedy of the East End, and the father of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Most Brahmins intensely disliked Fitzgerald’s successor, James Michael Curley. Born of poor immigrant parents, with no formal education beyond grammar school, Curley had followed much the same path as Fitzgerald; he had worked his way up in politics in Roxbury to become a local ward boss, member of the common council, representative in the state legislature, alderman, and then member of the city council. Like Fitzgerald, he was elected to Congress and, like Fitzgerald, after just one term in Washington, he ran for mayor. He appealed to all of the ethnics, whom he used to call the “newer races,” but especially his own, the Irish, when he labeled the Good Government Association as “Goo-Goos” and Boston’s Yankee business leaders as “the State Street Wrecking Crew.”⁴⁹

While Curley’s basic appeal was to the poor, he was extremely knowledgeable about a large range of subjects and a brilliant orator, who clasped to his bosom all of the icons, symbols, and rituals of the American republic. He was the Andrew Jackson of Boston’s city hall, opening the corridors and staircases to voters looking for jobs and favors of every description. As Jackson had represented the triumph of democracy for the backwoods frontiersman, the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians from whom he came, so the election of Curley was the triumph of the Irish Catholics and a sign to the Italian, Jewish, Portuguese, Polish, and other immigrants who now flooded the city of the possibilities of power. Curley dominated Boston politics for more than thirty years, serving as mayor for four terms, as congressman twice, and governor once; he built playgrounds, parks, and bathhouses, tore down slums, and paved streets for the benefit of ethnic neighborhoods at a high cost to Boston’s business community, whose downtown financial district was largely neglected. Eventually, he went to prison for five months in 1945 after being convicted of using the mails to defraud. (His sentence was commuted by President Harry Truman and he returned to finish his term.)

By his own admission, Curley was a rogue,⁵⁰ but he also was an ardent and even eloquent spokesman for the civic culture and civil religion. Like Schurz, who identified with the Yankee heroes of the Revolution in his speech on “true Americanism” at Faneuil Hall, Curley loved to praise the revolutionary heroes of the Brahmins as his own. Preaching the virtues of Americanism in a Faneuil Hall speech, he called Boston the “mother city of liberty.” He welcomed visitors to the city, which he said was “dedicated to … the doctrine of equality expressed in civil, political and religious liberty,” a city where they could visit the Old South Church, “sacred to the memory of John Hancock and Samuel Adams.” Never mind that Hancock and Adams shared the hatred of papism common to Boston in their day, or that leading Brahmins excluded the Irish from the banks and businesses and social clubs they controlled. Curley told visitors that after they had drunk “from freedom’s fountain in Boston” they should “go forth as zealous missionaries determined to teach by individual example the lesson of the [founding] fathers.”⁵¹

There was no inconsistency in Curley’s mind between obeying the teachings of the church and its vicar, the Pope, and those of America’s civil religion and its prophets and martyrs. Visiting the Lincoln Memorial in 1923, Mayor Curley preached: “America has ever been the object of divine favor, a factor in the divine scheme of human betterment.” God had sent Washington “in that darkest hour when we were most weak,” and when the “struggle and sacrifice for human rights and the blessings of liberty and quality were about to be lost, He sent us a savior—Lincoln.”⁵²

Jefferson’s concern that large numbers of badly educated immigrants used to tyranny might make poor material for citizens in a self-governing republic had not been entirely without foundation. Curley was a crook, after all, as were some of the Yankee bosses who preceded the Irish in Tammany Hall in New York. But no group took as rapidly to American politics as the Irish; and once in it, the Irish Catholics appropriated its heroes and symbols, articulated and embellished its litanies, and played by its fundamental rules. The Yankees who worried that the Irish could never overcome habits of servile dependence had underestimated the power of the civic culture to shape its citizens.

The Civic Culture and the Irish

At the height of the controversy over whether or not Irish Catholics could make good Americans, the New York Irish-American urged the preservation of an Irish identity in the United States; if they kept in mind “what was good and honorable and virtuous in the old land,” they would best be able to teach their children “to adopt and love what is good and noble in the new.”⁵³ The Boston Pilot, then a secular Irish paper, warned against self-hatred, “a moral deformity of the worst description,” and advocated the preservation of Irish social customs and of the Gaelic language, but no Irish leader advocated changing the First Amendment with its protections for freedom of speech and religion and its guarantee to the Catholic minority, among others, that church and state would be separated.

Irish social organizations continued to grow in the late 1850s and into the 1860s. Irish churches and the Irish press continued to flourish. Irish nationalism intensified, resulting in attacks on cooperation between England and the United States, even in something as obviously constructive as the opening of the Atlantic cable.⁵⁴ Irish-American nationalism, reflected in the activities of the Fenian Brotherhood and the Irish press, peaked between 1870 and 1890,⁵⁵ and both cultural and political nationalism waned over time.

So strong was the acceptance by Irish Catholics of principles of American freedom that American bishops at the First Vatican Council in 1869–1870 spoke in opposition to two dogmatic constitutions aimed at protecting their church against the dynamic changes sweeping the Western world. A growing number of priests and bishops felt no conflict between the American emphasis on freedom and Roman Catholicism, despite the Syllabus of Errors and the doctrine of papal infallibility.

The leading Americanizers were Archbishop James Gibbons of Baltimore, who was elevated to the cardinalate in 1886 and became a consultant to presidents and a friend to Protestant and Jewish causes, and Archbishop John Ireland of Minneapolis and St. Paul, who spoke bluntly and loudly about the universal validity of separation of church and state and of democracy. Ireland became more outspoken as the Americanizers within the American church gained influence, despite an implicit warning issued by Pope Leo XIII in an encyclical in 1888, Libertas praestantissimum, which condemned unconditional freedom of thought, speech, and worship. Catholic Americanists virtually ignored the encyclical. Many probably agreed with Father Isaac Hecker, who pointed out that the Pope was writing mainly for the people of an “eastern” mentality and intended no limitation on American ideas of liberty.⁵⁶

Catholic Americanists believed not just in the value of freedom for America but in the mission to spread that value to other countries. They were as imbued with the spirit of America’s civic culture as non-Catholics were, and Archbishop Ireland, the loudest apostle of Americanism, had boasted in several lectures in Paris that if Frenchmen would emulate American Catholics they would achieve success over antireligious forces. In Rome and in Europe, in response, conservative church leaders and theologians began to speak of the heresy of Americanism, and in 1885 Pope Leo issued a long-awaited encyclical to the church in America. Longinque Oceani made it plain that even if many of his friends and children in America had forgotten the Syllabus of Errors, he had not. He expressed satisfaction with the growth of the church in the U.S.—there were now more than twelve million Catholics—but warned that “it would be erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable state of the Church,” or that it would be expedient for church and state to be “dissevered and divorced in other countries as in America.” Almost all of the priests or bishops who urged reform on the European Continent—whatever the reform—were calling themselves or were being called “Americanists.”

European Catholics were on warning not to become like the Americans. But in the U.S. most Catholics accepted the idea of a strong separation between church and state, especially after the election of John F. Kennedy. “I am wholly opposed,” he had told the ministers in Houston in the 1960 campaign, “to the state being used by any religious group, Catholic or Protestant, to compel, prohibit or persecute the free exercise of any other religion. And that goes for any persecution at any time, by anyone, in any country.”⁵⁷ In the U.S. the Americanist Catholics had clearly triumphed.

So strongly had the idea of individual freedom become identified with American life that at the Second Vatican Council in 1965 the declaration on religious liberty was commonly referred to as the “American Schema.” Its chief author was John Courtney Murray, and its most powerful support came from American bishops against key figures in the Roman curia, Spanish bishops, and southern Italian prelates. In previous papal encyclicals and other expressions of Catholic theology, religious liberty was something to be tolerated in the interests of civic peace. There were no rights of conscience to be recognized in conflict with the one, true church, which, whenever possible, was to be favored over other religions. Millions of American Catholics had, in effect, repudiated that position. For two decades before the Second Vatican Council, Father Murray argued that it was impossible to separate religious freedom from civil freedom and that persons in error have rights which must be respected by church as well as state.⁵⁸

By the 1980s, Father Murray’s position had been embraced by the vast majority of American Irish Catholics. It was an outcome that Jefferson, with his fear of hierarchical religions, could not have predicted, and one that Tocqueville, who had prophesied either the demise of the Catholic church in the U.S. or, more likely, the absorption of Protestants into it, explicitly rejected. But neither Protestants nor Catholics disappeared. Some crossed over; others dropped out. They intermarried. More typically, Protestants and Catholics maintained their ancestral religious affiliations while finding it possible to share with and borrow from each other in an ever-moving American ethnic kaleidoscope. James Michael Curley once boasted that Brahmin politician Leverett Saltonstall, a popular Republican politician in Massachusetts and a Unitarian, who learned early in his career that the vote of an Irish Catholic was just as good as that of a Yankee Protestant, joined the charitable Irish society of Boston before Curley did.⁵⁹

Because the Irish were the largest Catholic group and spoke English, they dominated the Roman Catholic church in America throughout the century and helped to integrate other European Catholics into American culture. Since the Germans, Poles, Italians, and other groups spoke different languages and interpreted Catholicism in national terms, many chafed at what they thought was Irish inhospitableness. The Italians, with their emphasis on the occult, mystery, and passion, could hardly be expected to warm to the ascetic Irish approach to religion. The Germans, with their stress on language and culture, often scorned the Irish as an inferior people. And the Poles saw their own faith as inextricably linked with the destiny of their fatherland.⁶⁰ Each group developed national fraternal associations and, in some cases, national religious organizations as well, and always local parishes of the national church.

German Catholics had opened a parish of their own in Philadelphia as early as 1790. The German Catholic population increased fourteenfold between 1840 and 1870, by which year one of four Catholics was of German stock. But by 1916, during the First World War, only one of ten Catholics worshiped in a church that used the German language.⁶¹ German and other national church movements failed to win support in Rome because they did not have the backing of the dominant Irish-American leaders. German Catholics established their own parochial schools, benefit societies, and other organizations to help them adjust to the American environment, but those who tried to form a national church were frustrated by the U.S. and Roman hierarchies.

Resenting the domination of the Irish, a group of American German Catholics in 1890 asked Rome for a national clergy, for national schools, and proportional representation in the hierarchy for each U.S. nationality. The plan was denounced in the U.S. Senate and by President Benjamin Harrison, but, more important for the ears of Rome, it was opposed vigorously by the Irish Catholic bishops, who constituted half of the U.S. total. (Only 14 percent of American bishops were German.)⁶² Where the Germans did gain control over the church, as in Wisconsin, they began to behave like the Irish in their relationship to recently arrived groups, in this case, Polish Catholics. What the Germans thought of as justifiable pluralism in the 1880s, they disparaged as Polish parochialism in the 1900s. In 1904, some Poles formed an independent Polish National Church, which eventually claimed twenty-four churches and 28,200 communicants.

Many of the Irish Catholic bishops became apostles of Americanism, not only preventing the development of separatist movements linked to foreign languages and cultures, but, imbued with the ideals of the civic culture and the civil religion, becoming super-American patriots in the process. Nevertheless, just as Protestant ministers had done before them, they often displayed the narrower, parochial side of the civil religion. Archbishop O’Connell of Boston, writing to Archbishop Ireland, defended the sweeping of Catholic Spain from Cuba by American forces. It was good to replace “the meanness and narrowness of old Europe,” he wrote, with “the freedom of America.” O’Connell believed that “America is God’s apostle in Modern times,” and that its imperial advance reflected “God’s way of developing the world.”⁶³ Some Catholics, lay and clerical, became nativist bigots, too. They, particularly the Irish, flocked disproportionately to the banner of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin in his hysterical anti-Communist crusade in the early 1950s. Ironically, the Ku Klux Klan, which had originally seen Catholics as unfit to become Americans, elected a Catholic as its Grand Wizard in 1986.⁶⁴ More significantly, by the 1980s, Catholics played a major role in defending the ideals and principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—three Roman Catholics, two of them Irish, sat as guardians of the civic culture on the U.S. Supreme Court. In all of U.S. history, no president, no speaker of the House of Representatives, and no justice of the Supreme Court have been more ardent defenders of civil liberties, religious freedom, and voluntary pluralism than President Kennedy, Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill and Justice William J. Brennan, all descendants of nineteenth-century Irish immigrants and members of the Catholic church.

Probably less than one percent of the population at the time the Constitution was written, Roman Catholics were more than 20 percent by 1920. The United States had not become Roman Catholic, as many had feared; Roman Catholics had become American. By supporting the principle of separation of church and state, the Irish also contributed to the ideal of a civic culture as the basis of American identity by successfully challenging the assumption that Americanism was synonymous with Protestantism.

Thomas D’Arcy McGee, the Irish-born editor of The Celt, in the 1850s challenged the view that American character was fixed at the time of the Revolution: he said “American nationality” was “like a chemical solution” that “might contain independent elements, and yet form a whole, which would be different from, and better than any of them.”⁶⁵

Yet the Irish-dominated church was still seen by many Americans as a menace right up until the election of Kennedy in 1960. But by the 1980s, when perhaps almost half of the continuing flow of immigration to the U.S. was Catholic, there was virtually no discussion of a Catholic menace. The Americans had discovered something which, while difficult to export, clearly worked in their own environment. The permission to maintain traditional religious and cultural loyalties helped to bind immigrants and their children to the American political culture. By making it easy to join the polity, by defining nationality in essentially political terms, the unum had ensured the allegiance of the pluribus.