The War That Wasn't: Religious Conflict and Compromise in the Common Schools of New York State, 1865-1900

1. Explaining the History of Religion in Public Schools

Chapter 1 ____________________________ Explaining the History of Religion in Public Schools For, above all things, we wish to stamp deep upon the inmost minds of all readers of the signs of the times, that the solution of this practical question will and shall come, not from the general government, nor for many a year even from the official action of the States in severalty, but from the peaceable adjustments of communities and neighborhoods. —Bishop Thomas Jefferson Jenkins, “Education: To Whom Does It Belong?” (1892). In the mid-nineteenth century, Americans in the northern United States created an unrivaled system of mass education: publicly funded, democratically controlled, and largely secular “common schools.” This movement rested on the twin suppositions that neighborhood schools could offer an ideologically common education, and that democratic control afforded the best means for organizing and maintaining such schools. It should be no surprise that the common school flourished before the Civil War in the North and Midwest, where the district meeting and decentralized government formed pillars of a mostly rural, mostly Protestant society, and when the Age of Jackson brought universal white male suffrage. What is surprising—and important—is that the common school system should have expanded in the decades after the Civil War, when nonProtestant voters flexed new muscle at the polls, and when American society 1 grew more diverse, more urban, and more stratified than ever before. Religious diversity in particular proved challenging to the common (increasingly called “public”) system, as leaders from powerful minority religions, especially Catholicism, challenged the very assumption that one education could be common to all. They also questioned the idea that the voters, as opposed to the Church, were best suited to run the schools. Religious conflict shot through American political and social life, yet the public school enjoyed an impressive period of growth and consolidation. By 1900, public schools looked much like those that exist today: they commanded nearly all public educational expenditures and garnered more than 90 percent of the enrollment of school-age children. The expansion of public schooling after the Civil War happened in the context of another remarkable transformation: the flowering of popular participation in the democratic process. From 1876 to 1900, over 80 percent of the non-Southern electorate voted in presidential-year elections. And these voters came from all walks of life, with no appreciable differences among them regarding education or social status.1 Active, aggressive, and sometimes corrupt political parties nurtured these remarkably high turnouts through parades, voluntary organizations, stump speeches, and outright payments.2 Whatever their motivations for voting—concern over the issues, party loyalty, or profit—voters flexed considerable political muscle and practiced skills that they could bring into other political domains, including local school elections.3 These two factors, intense religious diversity and an entrenched system of local democracy, directly affected public school policy and played key roles in the expansion of public schooling. But what was the relationship between the two? THE WARFARE THESIS To explain the historical development of religious policy in public schools, most histories of the post-bellum era have looked to the words and actions of religious and political leaders, and to changes in state law. The period is a political historian’s trove. From the end of the Civil War until 1900, the issue of religion in public schools cycled twice through national politics, and both times engendered bitter rhetorical battles in leading periodicals, at the pulpit and atop campaign stumps. Before the Civil War, ethnoreligious differences among Americans played a significant role in how political parties wooed voters and, in turn, how the electorate voted.4 Tension between different groups sometimes flared violently in cities across the nation; anti-Irish and anti-Protestant mobs drew blood in New York City in 1835 and in Brooklyn in 1854.5 During the virulently nativist 1850s, Catholic and Protestant antipathy 2 Explaining the History of Religion in Public Schools spilled over into public school policy debates in major Northern cities where Catholics settled.6 To some degree, however, the Civil War changed the way that Americans regarded religious diversity. Ethnoreligious conflict returned—an 1871 Orange Day riot between Catholics and Protestants in New York City killed over 100 people—but not with the same support or effect that it had enjoyed before.7 The media frenzy over religious diversity subsided during the war, but the lull did not last. By 1869, events...