Irish vs. Yankees: A Social History of the Boston Schools by James W. Sanders (review)

The late Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Thomas P. O’Neill, was fond of saying that “all politics is local.” A lifetime Bostonian, O’Neill might have added that parochial education is local as well. At least that is the case in the Archdiocese of Boston and that is the thrust of this new book.

James Sanders shows how the contours of Catholic schooling in Boston were unique—a result of waves of Irish and Italian immigrants into a largely Protestant city. Faced with yearly arrivals of tens of thousands of impoverished communicants, the bishops of Boston concentrated on establishing parishes and building churches. Schools would have to wait.

That fact first caught Sanders’s attention more than forty years ago. In 1977, he had published an important study of parochial education in Chicago and was seeking a focus for his second book. He turned to Boston and discovered an experience altogether different from Chicago or most other major dioceses. “The Boston church’s parochial school effort had been minimal,” Sanders quickly learned, “and most Catholic children had gone to public schools” (xi).

Why was Boston different from Chicago and other dioceses? That was the question that Sanders pursued for four decades. His efforts were interrupted by a distinguished teaching career at the College of Staten Island, but in retirement he renewed his effort to answer that question. Scholars of American Catholicism in general and parochial education in particular are the beneficiaries.

The title captures the essence of the book—the Irish versus the Yankees. Founded in the seventeenth century by English colonists, the city of Boston became a battle ground in the nineteenth century when masses of Catholic immigrants eventually took political control from the Protestant elite. By the turn of the twentieth century, Boston was a predominantly Irish Catholic city with a public school system that was dominated by good Catholics from the School Committee to the school principals to the classroom teachers. There was little need for parish schools when the Catholics were in charge of the public schools.

In six brief, well-written chapters, Sanders unfolds that evolution from the tentative beginnings of the Diocese of Boston in 1808 to the early days of World War II. Each chapter is organized around the tenures of one of Boston’s bishops from Jean Cheverus to William Henry O’Connell. Sanders is quick to stress, however, that the books is a social history, not a church history. He notes that the bishops were key players in determining educational policy, but by no means the only players. Just as important, Sanders shows how these bishops were “sometimes controlled completely by various social forces that impinged on Catholic life in Boston” (xiii).

Irish vs. Yankees is a worthy addition to the literature on the evolving history of parochial education. The book highlights the fact that the history of American Catholic education is not a seamless garment but a mosaic made up of unique experiences in the multitude of dioceses across the country. As Sanders shows so well, Boston was different from Chicago and both were different from Milwaukee, San Antonio, and Los Angeles, among other Catholic communities. It is hard to generalize when parochial education is so local.

Sanders ends his study in 1944 with the passing of William Henry O’Connell, and that leaves readers wanting more. Scholars interested in the past 75 years will have to look beyond Sanders’s book to the work of John J. White at the University of Dayton and other scholars. Together, Sanders, White, and their colleagues provide a complete picture of a unique history of parish schools in Boston.