Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (6 page)

The British government manipulated the rules in another way before allowing O’Connell to take his seat. It insisted that O’Connell take the test oath before entering the Commons because he was elected before the oath was abolished. It was a particularly vindictive maneuver, one that surely did little to inspire reverence for the rule of law among the Irish. Rather than take the oath, O’Connell submitted himself to voters again and was elected without opposition on July 29, 1829.

Many in Britain believed that the Catholic Association’s victory would lead to revolution in Ireland, but that was not the intention of the movement’s leaders. Like so many Irish politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, Thomas Wyse sought to achieve practical change from within rather than pursue abstract ideals from outside. “My principles are already before you,” he told a crowd in County Tipperary when he stood for election himself in 1830. “I am an enemy to revolution, and therefore a friend to reform; opposed to anarchy and confusion, therefore hostile to abuses of all kinds.” To that end, Wyse created a network of local political organizations, called Liberal Clubs, that would create, in his words, “precision, constancy, unanimity, and uniformity.” This highly disciplined, centralized control of local politics, with its emphasis on unity and order, would become a hallmark of Tammany Hall under Irish-American leadership.
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Wyse’s genius for organization and his emphasis on pragmatic results rather than utopian ideals established the framework for the sort of organization that the Irish would embrace once they arrived in New York. The Catholic Association’s victories were a credit to O’Connell’s charisma and eloquence, but they also required discipline, order, and organization. As Thomas Wyse understood, the hard work of political organization often is far removed from the color and sound of rallies and meetings. Tammany Hall, like the Catholic Association, understood the importance of spectacle. But its greatest strength was organization.

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In early 1840, Daniel O’Connell welcomed an Irish-born visitor from New York City to his office in London, where he was tending to public business as a member of the House of Commons. John Hughes, a forty-three-year-old man with a strong chin, sharply drawn nose, and expansive forehead, was a native of County Tyrone, a highly contested borderland between Protestant settlers and Catholic natives like the Hughes family. O’Connell may have had a gift for articulating Catholic political and cultural alienation, but Hughes had experienced it firsthand, and he made little attempt to hide the scars. Writing of his early childhood, Hughes noted with characteristic irony that for five days—the first five days of his life—he was “on social and civil equality with the most favored subjects of the British Empire.” But then he was baptized a Catholic and so was relegated to second-class citizenship. He emigrated to the United States in 1817, when he was twenty years old, hoping to find a respite from what he called the “hereditary degradation” of Catholics in his native land.
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He found work first as a laborer in a stone quarry in Pennsylvania and then as a gardener on the grounds of Mount Saint Mary’s Catholic Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland. He caught the attention of a French-born priest named Jean Dubois, who noticed that the young Irishman often skipped meals to catch up on his private reading. Dubois arranged for Hughes to be admitted to the seminary, and Hughes was ordained a priest in 1826.

By the time of his meeting with O’Connell, Hughes was a bishop in New York, serving alongside his aging and frail mentor, Jean Dubois. It was hardly a secret that the younger and feistier Hughes was the true leader of New York’s mostly Irish Catholics, even though Dubois technically was the senior man in the diocese. Hughes was outspoken, aggressive, and political to his very marrow, although he spared little in excoriating those who accused him of acting more like a boss than a bishop.

Hughes’s many critics called him “Dagger John,” a reference to the little cross that he and other Catholic clergy scrawled next to their signatures on official correspondence. David Hales, editor of the
Journal of Commerce
newspaper, charged that Hughes’s cross actually
was
a dagger aimed at the identity and culture of Protestant New York. So he became “Dagger John.” The menacing nickname only added to the bishop’s larger-than-life image, but it also symbolized fears that Hughes might command his impoverished immigrant flock to violent political action—fears that Hughes was happy to stoke.

The bishop’s high profile, his insistence that Catholicism was compatible with American ideals, and his eagerness to confront hostile politicians and journalists made him a favorite target of those who saw him as little more than an agent of foreign popery. Walt Whitman called him a “mitred hypocrite,” while former New York City mayor Philip Hone called him a “generalissimo.” He was admired for his intellect, although some critics believed his focus was too 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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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 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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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 “sufficient leisure for this purpose.” He was busy, indeed, for he was about to embark on a political campaign designed to preserve a space for religious minorities to define and protect their own culture.
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Over the next several months, Hughes led an extraordinary public effort to defeat the Public School Society and the civic leaders who supported it. In doing so, he identified a genuine grievance rooted in an Irish memory of religious and cultural domination in Ireland. The Public School Society was portrayed as the equivalent of the Kildare Place Society; its mission was the same—to separate the Irish from their faith and culture and so make them more obedient citizens of the Protestant republic. Hughes confided his strategy to an unnamed fellow priest, saying that he planned “to detach” Catholic children “from the dangerous connexion and influence of the public schools.”
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Throughout the summer of 1840 and into the fall, Hughes rallied the city’s Catholics against the public schools by portraying New York’s civic elites in terms that his listeners would easily understand and resent. “In England,” he said at a meeting on September 21, “there is an officer who is designated the ‘Keeper of the King’s Conscience,’ and the Trustees of the Public School Society are becoming the guardians of the consciences of both the Catholics and Protestants.” He argued that if the city refused to fund Catholic schools, “let it be branded on the flag of America that Catholics were denied and deprived of equal rights.” And he portrayed the Public School Society as elitist and undemocratic. The society, he said, “was not at any time from its origin the representative of the state, but merely a private corporation” made up of some of the city’s wealthiest citizens. In fact, of the thirty-four members of the PSS executive board, twenty-three were financiers.
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