Ballots & Bibles: Ethnic Politics and the Catholic Church in Providence (review)

Most readers would be aware of the unique political arrangement of religious tolerance that Roger Williams helped to create in the Rhode Island colony (and later the state) because of his view of how God chose to save mankind. Evelyn Savidge Sterne in her Ballots and Bibles: Ethnic Politics and the Catholic Church in Providence reminds Rhode Islanders, and perhaps informs a wider readership, of another way in which Rhode Island was politically different from other states.

In 1842, the nativist-inclined faction which controlled Rhode Island, in order to protect the state from what they saw as the injurious influence of foreigners, most of whom were Catholics, wrote into the state's new constitution a provision that required foreign-born citizens to hold $134 worth of taxable property in order to qualify to vote. Although Rhode Island's foreign-born population was still relatively small in 1842, it was growing rapidly. The conservative leaders of the state looked at what was happening in contemporary New York city politics and resolved not to let the same thing happen in Rhode Island. While the leaders of most states at this time were moving in the direction of universal manhood suffrage, Rhode Island's leaders took their state in the opposite direction, although only after putting down a "rebellion" led by Thomas Wilson Dorr.

Second- and third-generation Irishmen in Rhode Island did not begin to make their influence felt in the state's Democratic Party until the last decades of the nineteenth century, when the Irish made a serious, sustained challenge to "Yankee" leadership positions in the Democratic Party organization (and later in the state). How was it possible for a politically disenfranchised group to make the political progress the Irish did in the years after 1890? That is the question answered in Dr. Sterne's book. After providing the historical background necessary to understanding the main focus of her work, Dr. Sterne moves to a consideration of the multiplicity of parish, diocesan, and fraternal societies which the clergy and lay Catholics of the state created, beginning in 1827, and how they helped aspiring politicians to develop the skills and build the constituencies necessary to success when the opportunity arose to participate in Rhode Island politics. This second section of the book has two particularly good and fresh sections on Catholics and World War I and Americanization of the immigrant. In this center part of her work, Dr. Sterne makes use of sources that are generally not available to historians because few have taken the time to collect them, namely, the various accounts of the Catholic organizational activity that appeared in contemporary newspapers. These newspaper articles are often the only witness to the activities of the groups because diocesan and parish archives contain only scattered and incomplete records of the groups.

When Dr. Sterne turns to consider what she entitles "The Flowering of Catholic Politics," she has to deal with the reality that there are few in-depth studies of the post-World War I period in Rhode Island. While much has been written on the question of suffrage reform in Rhode Island (and Dr. Sterne in her work adds to what is known), the full story still has not been told. The same is true about the efforts toward educational reform that came out of the discovery of severe deficiencies in American education in the process of recruiting an army of draftees to fight the war. Dr. Sterne properly discusses the Peck Act, which was Rhode Island's attempt to address the educational problems that the war revealed, in relation to the Sentinellist agitation of the late 1920's and early 1930's and does so in a manner that well serves the purposes of her work.

Ballots and Bibles is a substantial contribution to the historical studies of Rhode Island. It is also an important study...