Read Online Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics by Terry Golway - Free Book Online
Authors: Terry Golway
Ads: Link
humbugs.” 43
Hughes’s intervention provoked a furious reaction from the city’s leading newspapers. Pro-Whig papers insisted that Hughes was a tool of Tammany Hall; Democratic papers argued that the bishop was plotting with Seward and the Whigs against Tammany Democrats. It’s hardly a wonder the newspapers were confused—when one of the city’s leading nativists, Samuel Morse, and the anti-Catholic Journal of Commerce endorsed a ticket of their own to oppose Hughes and Carroll Hall, three of the presumably nativist candidates on the Morse– Journal ticket also had Hughes’s endorsement! Some candidates apparently found much to admire in both the Hughes and the Morse positions.
The legislative elections of 1841 were a Democratic triumph, as they captured both houses of the legislature from Seward’s Whigs. All ten Democratic State Assembly candidates endorsed by Carroll Hall won, but a more meaningful result came in the three Assembly districts in which Hughes’s candidates ran separate campaigns and proved to be spoilers, splitting the Democrats and allowing Whigs to prevail. The message was clear: Irish Catholics could hold the balance of power between the Whigs and the Democrats. Tammany Hall had tried to evade the public school issue until now, but the election of 1841 put an end to the Hall’s straddling. The city’s Whigs, on the other hand, moved in the other direction, appalled by the spectacle of a Catholic bishop functioning as a de facto political boss, even if that boss happened to be friendly with the Whig governor, Seward.
In the opening weeks of the new legislative session, the chairman of the Assembly’s schools committee, William Maclay, a Democrat from New York City, introduced a new school-reform bill that portrayed the Public School Society as an unaccountable private monopoly that had lost the public’s confidence. He proposed that the school system be run on a ward level, as the Spencer report had recommended, accountable to locally elected trustees and other ward-based officials. There was, however, no mention of religious instruction in publicly funded district schools. The wording was intentionally agnostic, so to speak. It neither mandated nor barred religious instruction.
The Maclay bill passed the State Assembly thanks to the overwhelming support of Democrats. Bishop Hughes, who met with Maclay prior to the vote, was delighted with the result, even though the bill did not achieve his goal of public funding for Catholic schools. He told Seward that he was willing to give the new system “a fair trial.” 44
When the bill seemed stalled in the State Senate in April 1842, Hughes made preparations to field another independent Catholic political ticket, this one in the city’s looming elections for mayor and the Common Council that same month. Catholic candidates promised to wage a campaign against any incumbents who supported the “aristocratic” and “anti-republican” principles of the Public School Society—the notion of Irish Catholics defining what was “republican” and what was not would have struck critics as incomprehensible. 45
Democrats understood the threat Hughes posed, but opposition to the bill was so intense that supporters agreed to a painful compromise: The Senate version of the bill contained new language that prohibited sectarian religious instruction in public schools. The original wording had been studiously vague on the subject of religion, but the Senate version removed any middle ground. With the modified language, the bill passed the legislature, and the Public School Society’s monopoly passed into history. New York City’s Catholic leaders celebrated the defeat of an “oligarchy” based on “anti-republican principles,” language that emphasized that the city’s mostly immigrant Catholics were on the side of bedrock American values, while its antagonists were the stewards of an outdated aristocracy. 46
A portion of the city’s
Hughes’s intervention provoked a furious reaction from the city’s leading newspapers. Pro-Whig papers insisted that Hughes was a tool of Tammany Hall; Democratic papers argued that the bishop was plotting with Seward and the Whigs against Tammany Democrats. It’s hardly a wonder the newspapers were confused—when one of the city’s leading nativists, Samuel Morse, and the anti-Catholic Journal of Commerce endorsed a ticket of their own to oppose Hughes and Carroll Hall, three of the presumably nativist candidates on the Morse– Journal ticket also had Hughes’s endorsement! Some candidates apparently found much to admire in both the Hughes and the Morse positions.
The legislative elections of 1841 were a Democratic triumph, as they captured both houses of the legislature from Seward’s Whigs. All ten Democratic State Assembly candidates endorsed by Carroll Hall won, but a more meaningful result came in the three Assembly districts in which Hughes’s candidates ran separate campaigns and proved to be spoilers, splitting the Democrats and allowing Whigs to prevail. The message was clear: Irish Catholics could hold the balance of power between the Whigs and the Democrats. Tammany Hall had tried to evade the public school issue until now, but the election of 1841 put an end to the Hall’s straddling. The city’s Whigs, on the other hand, moved in the other direction, appalled by the spectacle of a Catholic bishop functioning as a de facto political boss, even if that boss happened to be friendly with the Whig governor, Seward.
In the opening weeks of the new legislative session, the chairman of the Assembly’s schools committee, William Maclay, a Democrat from New York City, introduced a new school-reform bill that portrayed the Public School Society as an unaccountable private monopoly that had lost the public’s confidence. He proposed that the school system be run on a ward level, as the Spencer report had recommended, accountable to locally elected trustees and other ward-based officials. There was, however, no mention of religious instruction in publicly funded district schools. The wording was intentionally agnostic, so to speak. It neither mandated nor barred religious instruction.
The Maclay bill passed the State Assembly thanks to the overwhelming support of Democrats. Bishop Hughes, who met with Maclay prior to the vote, was delighted with the result, even though the bill did not achieve his goal of public funding for Catholic schools. He told Seward that he was willing to give the new system “a fair trial.” 44
When the bill seemed stalled in the State Senate in April 1842, Hughes made preparations to field another independent Catholic political ticket, this one in the city’s looming elections for mayor and the Common Council that same month. Catholic candidates promised to wage a campaign against any incumbents who supported the “aristocratic” and “anti-republican” principles of the Public School Society—the notion of Irish Catholics defining what was “republican” and what was not would have struck critics as incomprehensible. 45
Democrats understood the threat Hughes posed, but opposition to the bill was so intense that supporters agreed to a painful compromise: The Senate version of the bill contained new language that prohibited sectarian religious instruction in public schools. The original wording had been studiously vague on the subject of religion, but the Senate version removed any middle ground. With the modified language, the bill passed the legislature, and the Public School Society’s monopoly passed into history. New York City’s Catholic leaders celebrated the defeat of an “oligarchy” based on “anti-republican principles,” language that emphasized that the city’s mostly immigrant Catholics were on the side of bedrock American values, while its antagonists were the stewards of an outdated aristocracy. 46
A portion of the city’s
Similar Books
