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Authors: Terry Golway
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electorate did not share the Catholics’ joy or their analysis of the Public School Society. Walt Whitman, writing in the journal Aurora, complained that passage of the Maclay bill would allow the “teaching of Catholic superstition.” He was disappointed that his fellow Democrats had caved in to Hughes and the “filthy Irish rabble” he led. Two days after passage of the Maclay bill, when voters went to the polls to choose a mayor and aldermen, gangs rampaged through the heavily Irish Sixth Ward and then moved on to assail Hughes’s residence adjacent to the old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry Street. Little damage was done, but the message was unmistakable. 47
John Hughes did not achieve his immediate object, but, in a sense, the campaign for public funding was a means to a larger political and cultural end. Hughes contended that the nation’s founding ideals created a place for minority groups who had the right to reject the values of a dominant culture if they found them offensive. He used the language of liberty to argue with his antagonists; he used the power of memory to unify the Irish portion of his flock. This mobilization, like that of O’Connell’s in the 1820s, demonstrated the power of mass politics even in the face of more powerful cultural and political forces.
John Hughes was, in fact, much more than a local spiritual leader—he was the voice of politically engaged American Catholicism. He was not a member of Tammany Hall. But he was, to be sure, the boss.
. . .
Before John Hughes arrived in New York, the Irish lacked a commanding, unifying political voice around which to rally in the face of a hostile civic culture. The Roman Catholic Diocese of New York was fragmented and loosely administered before the 1840s. Hughes changed all that, replacing anarchy with a tightly organized hierarchy that foreshadowed the style and discipline of Tammany Hall. After Hughes became bishop in his own right when Jean Dubois retired due to ill health, power was centralized in Hughes’s office, lay trustees at the parish level were made irrelevant, dependable clerics were recruited from Ireland to serve as foot soldiers in Hughes’s expansion plans, and a new newspaper, the Freeman’s Journal , was founded to serve as a print pulpit for the bishop.
With his skepticism of reformers, including abolitionists, whose ideals and theories seemed to promise heaven on earth, Hughes also set a pattern for Tammany Hall. Hughes’s religious training taught him that perfection was impossible on earth. The Catholic Church, he said in 1852, had “little confidence in theoretical systems which assume that great or enduring benefit is to result from the sudden or unexpected excitements, even of a religious kind . . . by which the pace of society is to be preternaturally quickened in the path of universal progress.” Social experiments, he added, too often were prescribed by “new doctors who turned out to have been only quacks.” Tammany’s aversion to radical politics, especially socialism, could be traced to Hughes’s suspicion of those who promised to achieve moral purity and civic perfection in the form of a well-administered city government. 48
John Hughes rose to prominence not only because he demanded equal justice for Catholics but also because he defied the popular linkage of Americanism with Protestantism. When one of his longtime antagonists, lawyer Hiram Ketchum, insisted that the United States was a Protestant country, Hughes issued a stinging reply that must have shocked non-Catholic New Yorkers. “That a great majority of the inhabitants of this country are not Catholic, I admit,” he said. “But that it is a Protestant country, or a Catholic country, or a Jewish country, or a Christian country in a sense that would give any sect or combination of sects the right to oppress any other sect, I utterly deny.” 49
Hughes saw all minority religions, not just Catholics, as vulnerable to an oppressive
John Hughes did not achieve his immediate object, but, in a sense, the campaign for public funding was a means to a larger political and cultural end. Hughes contended that the nation’s founding ideals created a place for minority groups who had the right to reject the values of a dominant culture if they found them offensive. He used the language of liberty to argue with his antagonists; he used the power of memory to unify the Irish portion of his flock. This mobilization, like that of O’Connell’s in the 1820s, demonstrated the power of mass politics even in the face of more powerful cultural and political forces.
John Hughes was, in fact, much more than a local spiritual leader—he was the voice of politically engaged American Catholicism. He was not a member of Tammany Hall. But he was, to be sure, the boss.
. . .
Before John Hughes arrived in New York, the Irish lacked a commanding, unifying political voice around which to rally in the face of a hostile civic culture. The Roman Catholic Diocese of New York was fragmented and loosely administered before the 1840s. Hughes changed all that, replacing anarchy with a tightly organized hierarchy that foreshadowed the style and discipline of Tammany Hall. After Hughes became bishop in his own right when Jean Dubois retired due to ill health, power was centralized in Hughes’s office, lay trustees at the parish level were made irrelevant, dependable clerics were recruited from Ireland to serve as foot soldiers in Hughes’s expansion plans, and a new newspaper, the Freeman’s Journal , was founded to serve as a print pulpit for the bishop.
With his skepticism of reformers, including abolitionists, whose ideals and theories seemed to promise heaven on earth, Hughes also set a pattern for Tammany Hall. Hughes’s religious training taught him that perfection was impossible on earth. The Catholic Church, he said in 1852, had “little confidence in theoretical systems which assume that great or enduring benefit is to result from the sudden or unexpected excitements, even of a religious kind . . . by which the pace of society is to be preternaturally quickened in the path of universal progress.” Social experiments, he added, too often were prescribed by “new doctors who turned out to have been only quacks.” Tammany’s aversion to radical politics, especially socialism, could be traced to Hughes’s suspicion of those who promised to achieve moral purity and civic perfection in the form of a well-administered city government. 48
John Hughes rose to prominence not only because he demanded equal justice for Catholics but also because he defied the popular linkage of Americanism with Protestantism. When one of his longtime antagonists, lawyer Hiram Ketchum, insisted that the United States was a Protestant country, Hughes issued a stinging reply that must have shocked non-Catholic New Yorkers. “That a great majority of the inhabitants of this country are not Catholic, I admit,” he said. “But that it is a Protestant country, or a Catholic country, or a Jewish country, or a Christian country in a sense that would give any sect or combination of sects the right to oppress any other sect, I utterly deny.” 49
Hughes saw all minority religions, not just Catholics, as vulnerable to an oppressive
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