The Origins of American Parochial Schools

The American system of Catholic schooling developed along lines parallel to those of the development of American public education. In the early history of the United States, schooling was largely left to the initiative of parents. Children were educated more in the home, the church, in informal, seasonal schools, and in the workplace as apprentices (Cremin, 1980; Kaestle, 1983). The educational messages of these institutions at the time were, in large measure, consistent with each other. That is, a child would learn many of the same values and attitudes in all four different environments (Lee, 1991). Protestants, for example, may have heard the Bible in church on Sunday, or at home, and also learned to read the Bible in school. Catholic parochial schools existed in which Catholic children also learned messages consistent with those from home and church. But until the second third of the nineteenth century, because so many different types of schools existed, because the Catholic popluation of the U.S. was relatively small, and because the American majority's attitude toward schooling was informal, Catholic schooling was not a big issue, for the country or for Catholics (Cross, 1965). 

By the mid-nineteenth century, as the economy became more and more urban, industrial and commercial, an American commitment to schools as the formal institution for education developed. Most Americans, Protestants, saw schools as the way to prepare children for the new world of work (Katznelson and Weir, 1985). And because that world had become more standardized, more regulated, less seasonal, so did schools become more formal and regulated, with such practices as age-grading and attendance records. Though the purpose of schooling was now geared more toward the needs of an industrial workplace, the place of religion in the schools was not entirely lost. Common or district schools continued to teach moral values or even to read from the Bible. Regardless of their sect, most Protestants could acquiesce to these practices in the common schools (Cross, 1965). 

With the rapid development of common schools, formal schooling's near ubiquitousness would have soon put Catholics, who already felt alienated from the dominant culture, at an even further disadvantage. Even more than a disadvantage, some states were so enthused with the idea of universal education that schooling became compulsory. Since Catholics believed that common schools were in reality Protestant, saw that their children suffered prejudice in public schools (Cremin, 1980), or feared that their children would lose their faith without an explicitly Catholic education[2], compulsory education laws forced Catholics to make difficult choices.

The point of view that came to be the conservative or orthodox position on the school problem was born with the New York school controversy in the 1840s, when Catholic schools tried to obtain a share of the public funds for education. Bishop John Hughes may have initiated his case for public support of Catholic schools in the interest of the poor Catholic parents who could not afford both taxes and tuition. But, in the end, it seemed that Hughes used the case to consolidate his own hierarchical power over schools[3]. In fact, he declared that schools should be considered more necessary for Catholics than churches. Cross (1965) points out that while this is a "gross exaggeration", non-Catholics also held peculiar ideas about formal schooling. While Hughes suggested that Catholic schools were necessary for the survival of the Church in America, "most non-Catholics believed that the public school was a unique and irreplaceable engine of democracy and progress" (Cross, 1965:209), an idea that seems just as unrealistically ambitious as Hughes's. Still, Hughes's idea served as the impetus for several councils of the collective body of Catholic bishops.

After Hughes failed to win public funds for parochial schools, American Catholic bishops began to issue stricter and stricter policy statements regarding the establishment of parochial schools. In 1852, the First Plenary Council of Baltimore urged American bishops to see that schools were established in connection with Churches. In 1866, the Second Provincial Council pressed pastors to construct parochial schools, wherever it could be done. Finally, in 1884, the Third Plenary Council required bishops and priests to build parochial schools and bound the laity to send their children to such schools, unless a bishop granted exception for a serious cause. Furthermore, these parochial schools were to be built by 1886, if they did not already exist, and were to be maintained in perpetuum, though these two requirements also were subject to a bishop's discretion in the event of grave difficulties. The Council also acknowledged the importance of public schools by requiring that parochial schools be overseen by a School Commission whose purpose was "to put parish schools fully on a level with public schools" (Parent, undated:19).

The bishops could not have made a much stronger decree regarding Catholic schooling for all Catholic children. But compliance with the Third Plenary Council was never total. Cross (1965) lists the French Canadians among the most zealous establishers of parochial schools, while in his study of Providence ethnic groups, Perlmann (1988) places the Irish near the middle range in their commitment to Catholic schooling. One can look at compliance with the school-in-every-parish rule as a reflection of ethnic values, because the Vatican itself, in providing for "national" parishes, had made ethnic schools possible. 

National parishes were a response to the problem that immigration presented to the American Catholic Church. Until the 1830s native-born American Catholics, having overcome the prejudice of the nation's early years, held as integrated and as prestigious a position in American society as any other group (Fichter, 1960; Dolan, 1985). By the late eighteenth century numerous immigrant groups, importing their own versions of the faith, caused discord and disunity in a Church too small to absorb their numbers. To prevent "leakage", or falling away from the Church among the immigrants, the Pope allowed United States parishes to deviate from the normal geographical divisions and set themselves up instead on the basis of ethnicity (Linkh, 1975). 

The Irish Migration

Even after seven centuries of what Fallows (1979) calls British oppression, it took the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s to cause Irish Catholics to emigrate significantly. Large numbers of them settled in the northeastern United States. They became the first large group of distinctive immigrants to the young country and an important presence in industrial New England because until the 1880s, their numbers were not matched by any other immigrant group (Perlmann, 1988).

They were also the first large group of Catholics in American. Though their priests did encourage manual labor for all young healthy people, then-popular Catholic dogma about accepting one's station in life (Hartford, 1990) is far from the only reason that the Irish accepted the unskilled, risky jobs that no one else wanted. Perhaps the immigrants' most pressing reason for accepting such work stemmed from the fact that the most destitute among them remained close to their ports of debarkation, usually Boston or New York (Ibson, 1990), trying to live in a city when they had only rural, agricultural skills and very little education. In Boston as of 1850, 70% of the Irish were employed in only 3 different occupations,[4]a pattern far different from that of any other contemporary ethnic group in that city (Handlin, 1941/1979: 57-59). Handlin (p. 70) adds that as much as twenty years after the inital immigration, the Irish in Boston in 1860 "unquestionably were the lowest in the occupational hierarchy." The reasons why children born to these immigrants may have continued to work in unskilled jobs for a while include discrimination in hiring practices, with advertisements for many more skilled jobs specifying that "No Irish Need Apply." [DELETE PARTS? Discrimination made life difficult for the Irish, who, like so many immigrants of so many time periods, had come, among other reasons, in order to improve their economic status. But they had begun the first episode of a series of Irish migrations at a time when the price for economic and social mobility was acculturation (Greeley, 1976).]

Irish Culture in New England

The Irish Catholics who settled in New England played important roles in the region's industry and politics. It is important to note the obvious: the Irish in New England, like any other group, differed among themselves as well. In fact, Ibson and Hartford sometimes speak as though any given Irish person differed within him or her self alone. My aim here is to discuss a few sources of such tension.

Hartford (1990) discusses two major institutions of the Irish culture in Holyoke, Massachusetts: the saloon and the church. The saloon was one place where Irish ethnicity remained very important for a long time. Hartford (1990:53,55) claims that the emphasis on ethnicity was one reason that saloon culture contributed little to class development, but it seems more reasonable to blame the gambling and fighting that accompanied it. The Church, trying to counter the effects of saloon culture, sponsored measures aimed at what Hartford terms "enclave respectability," including a temperance movement. The Church supported other aspects of Irish culture including Irish nationalism (a desire to see Ireland liberated from Britain) and thrift. 

But tensions, near-contradictions, existed within the Irish church itself. For example, Hartford writes that it is not clear how much attention Irish-American priests paid to Rome's dictates on satisfaction with one's station in life. Holyoke priests encouraged independent circumstances such as self-employment and homeowning, which, incidentally, were more attainable in parts other than Holyoke. Prosperous parishioners were not only individually more respectable to Americans, but meant more money for the parish, and could thereby make the Church more respectable as well (Hartford, 1990:62). In fact, Father Steven Byrnes's immigrant guidebook claimed that good-looking churches bespoke "a thrifty and prosperous Catholic people" while wretched-looking churches indicated "a people given up to drunkeness and other degrading vices."[5] John Francis Maguire (1868/1969:21) also wrote "to the stranger entering the harbor [at Prince Edward's Island], the most striking object is a well-built church, with lofty spires surmounted by a gilded cross."

In Catholic mobility the goal was financial independence, not riches, and priests cautioned their flock against losing their souls in pursuit of worldly success. The Catholic version of mobility, based as it was on the Church's social teachings, correlated with a tendency to subordinate individual interest to group interest. This greatly reinforced the enclave consciousness of Irish workers, and encouraged class cooperation and political action.[6]

The French Canadian Migration

As with the Irish, the emigration of French Canadians was triggered, in part, by an agricultural crisis. By the 1860s their high birth rate[7] and the soil fatigued from poor crop rotation combined to create a land shortage in the southern part of Québec, where 90 percent of French Canadians lived. In the same decade, the end of the United States' Civil War released pent-up civilian demand for textiles and made the South's cotton available to Northern manufacturers. Recruiters from the New England textile industries encouraged about 200,000 habitants (peasant farmers) to leave for New England during the 1860s alone (Gerstle, 1989: 21; Higham, 1955: 15-17).

The uniqueness of the French Canadian immigration experience only begins with recruitment. By 1900, about 500,000, or one fourth of Quebecís population, had migrated to the United States, virtually all of them to New England (Gerstle, 1989; Brault, 1986). Naturally, such large numbers did not leave Québec unremarked. Many Québec clergy encouraged the Canadian government to make cheap land available in an effort to repatriate its 18- to 40-year-olds (Brault, 1986). Brault (1986) cites estimates that nearly half of all the Québecois who emigrated did repatriate. In the first place, many habitants went to New England intending to stay only as long as necessary to make enough money to save their farms back home. Others returned to Québec when life in New England turned out not to be as good as expected. Some families moved back and forth as many as three times (Fréchette, 1936).

Lorsque j'arrivai au Massachusetts, il y a 40 ans, la position des Canadiens, en Nouvelle Angleterre n'etais pas des plus enviable, et j'en étais désappointé.

(Clément Fréchette, 1936: 35)[8]

On the other side of the border, New Englanders certainly remarked the influx of huge numbers of French Canadians arriving during a time of intense class conflict ìwhen capitalists were still trying to establish firmly their new mode of production in the face of recalcitrant workers, farmers and shopkeepersî (Gerstle, 1989:22). Hostility flared between the Irish, who were trying to improve their economic standing through unionization, and the French Canadians entering New Englandís working-class communities as strike-breakers, desperate enough to work, and to send their families to work, long hours at miserable wages (Gerstle, 1989). Some French Canadian men found skilled jobs. But as Handlin (1941/1979) had written earlier about the Irish, Petrin (1990:32) writes that no other immigrant group was so concentrated in three industries as the French Canadians in cotton textiles, building, and shoes. Their unskilled position on the economic ladder earned them the apellation ìthe Chinese of the Eastî (Carroll Wright, Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor Annual Report for 1881, quoted in MacDonald, 1896) REWORD FOR P.C. Wright denigrated the French Canadians as an inhumane race willing to send their children to work. But low pay in textile factories made this practice necessary, and French Canadians were not alone among textile workers in doing so (Petrin, 1990:32). Unfortunately, their preponderance in the textile worker population probably allowed Wright to see this as an ethnic characteristic. Conditions such as this contributed to the disappointment of people like Fréchette.

French Canadian Culture in New England

ìAs a class, the New England French are treated considerately in public because of their votes, disparaged in private because of general dislike, and sought by all for the work they do and the money they spend.î

William MacDonald,

The Nation (Oct. 15, 1896)

The French Canadians who did settle in New England and came to call themselves Franco-Americans soon acquired other stereotypes. Stereotypes regarding their defensiveness reflected a truth that these people created some of the most insular and tenacious ethnic communities in the United States (Gerstle, 1989). These stereotypes could then plausibly promote the view held by nativists that Franco-Americans, as well as many other lingustic minorities, were un-American or disloyal to America.

In this stereotype, there is some truth, if applied only partially and only temporarily to the French Canadians in New England. Petrin (1990) reports that until the 1920s, French Canadians in New England had some of the lowest naturalization rates of any immigrants in the country. For the last 40 years of the nineteenth century, when many French Canadians were or hoped to be too transient and temporary to become naturalized, low figures are not surprising. For the remainder of both the period and the people, Petrin (1990) explains that many French Canadians feared that changing their national identity would threaten their ethnic identity. When economic conditions created the desire for more political involvement, naturalization rates went up. In order to feel good about this, Franco-Americans began articulating a view of American nationality as separate from their ethnicity, citizenship a matter of politics, ethnicity a matter of the heart, loyalty to one's country a matter of duty or law, loyalty to one's traditions a matter of spirit.

To see this duality in action, it is interesting to look at the extreme case of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, often referred to as la ville la plus française aux Etats-Unis, so French in fact that immigrants of other nationalities settling there typically learned both English and French (Gerstle, 1989; Wessel, 1931). Despite such status for their own language, a 1926 study of Woonsocket rated Franco-American men higher than any other local immigrant groupsóspecifically Slavs, Italians, and Jewsóin their ability to speak English. At the same time though, the Franco-Americans stood out among the others for their loyalty to the mother tongue (Wessel, 1931). One conclusion to draw from this is that being determined not to assimilate did not mean refusing to learn English, but it did mean refusing to give up French. 

French Canadians arriving in New England found the already established Irish Catholic parishes too austere and their own roles in parish governance too circumscribed compared to their experience in Québec. They also found it difficult to confess sins or follow sermons in English. Building their own parishes and schools became a sign of both Franco-American permanence in the United States and of their refusal to assimilate (Petrin, 1990). 

In looking at the Irish side of the story and when reading accounts based on Irish authors, one caveat should be kept in mind: many of those authors seem to ignore other American Catholics. For example, Andrew M. Greeley titled one of his books The Catholic Experience: an interpretation of the history of American Catholicism, which contains one chapter called "The Chicago Experience"óChicago hardly equals Americaóand seven chapters about English-speaking men, at least eleven of those men being specifically Irish. It follows then that the caveat applies to the claims Irish writers made regarding Irish Catholic schooling. For example,when Fallows (9179:132) writes "[t]hrough the 1950s, the vast network of parochial schools in urban areas was maintained, staffed, and attended largely by Irish Catholics,"she is doing something Weiscz (1976) attributes to many Irish of the era: ignoring the many foreign-language or bilingual schools established and attended by Catholics of other national heritages which were also part of that vast network. For some reason the history of Irish-American Catholicism has often come to be thought of as the history of American Catholicism. This could show how true is McAffrey's (1992) assertion that Irish-Americans strongly shaped the Church in the United States. Or it could mean that since the Irish are writing this history, it becomes theirs. No matter what explanation we may use, the subtle way in which Catholics of other national backgrounds are left out can provide a hint to the attitudes about them held by the Irish hierarchy in the past. 

McAffrey (1992) and Fallows (1979) both stress the importance of parochial schools for Irish Catholics. Parochial schools may have been considered among the most important institutions of the Irish Americans. But it does not seem to be the case that Irish Americans placed any more value on parochial schools than other Catholic ethnic groups. 

To what extent can Fallows's qualitative claim that parochial schools were staffed and attended largely by Irish Catholics be considered true for New England? Perlmann's (1988) detailed quantitative analysis of conditions in Providence, Rhode Island, shows a sharply lower reliance on Catholic schools among Irish and Italians as compared to other ethnic Catholics. If the Irish sent even a small percentage of their children to Catholic schools, sheer numbers would make them appear to be a substantial population, but even these numbers would place the Providence Irish only near the middle of a scale of commitment to Catholic schooling by ethnic group. Looking at Boston, where only 43% of all Catholic parishes maintained schools in 1900 and which continued to have a relative dearth of Catholic schools (Perlmann, 1988:64-70), we see that 83% (24 of the 29) of the French Canadian parishes there maintained schools, as of 1943, in a proportion exceeding that of any other Catholic group (Parent, undated:16). 

Perlmann (1988:69) suggests that the low percentage of Catholic schools in Boston may be related to the high percentage of Irish Catholics there, and their priorities. He, like Sanders (1985), says that Boston's Irish Catholics were more interested in building expensive churches, often waiting decades before building schools. Hartford (1990) and Perlmann (1988) indicate that educational as well as religious issues may have been behind the Irish habit of church-first-school-much-later. In his chapter on Irish Holyoke, Hartford writes that in the 1870s one woman was reported to have "boasted that her children had not attended school in two years and that no one could make them go" (Hartford, 1990:54). Hartford puts this mother's opinion in the minority among parents, but goes on to say that unemployed male truants concerned school authorities and newspaper reporters through the 1890s, apparently doing much of their learning in gangs and saloons. Perlmann (1988: 23, 29) claims that by 1880 virtually all children spent at least a few years in school, but in Providence, Irish children and children of Irish parents were less likely than any other white children to enter high school. He cites glaring differences between Irish and Yankees in patterns of schooling and child labor. His careful statistical analysis finds these differences to be partly due to social class and family structure, but attributes the residual difference to ethnicity (51).

Sanders (1985) writes that in Boston even the Irish Cardinal Williams (1866-1907) did not maintain strong attachment to Catholic schooling, desiring instead for Catholics acceptance by and competence in Yankee society and seeing no harm in gaining those through attendance in public schools. His successor Cardinal O'Connor (1911-1944) desired to adhere to what he saw as the Pope's wishes that all American Catholic children attend a parochial school and devoted more time, money, and personnel to that end. Sanders characterizes the success O'Connor claimed as "illusory," pointing out that in Boston's "suburbs where the greatest expansion took place, in 1907 one in twelve Catholic children attended a church school, while by 1930 the ratio had...been reduced to one in 10.6" (Sanders, 1985: 135). He goes on to show that the total increase in the percentage of children attending Catholic schools was accounted for in large part simply by the increase in the Catholic proportion of the total population. If as Sanders says, Catholic school population increased 2.9 percent, while Catholic population grew 3.2 percent, then it would seem probable that the new Catholics were using Catholic schools at a rate higher than were the old Catholics (2.9 is 90.6% of 3.2, a figure nowhere near what would have been possible when only 43% of all parishes maintained schools). Furthermore, one could suspect that if the newer Boston Catholics were primarily responsible for the increase in Catholic school use, probably they were not Irish.

As Weiscz (1972) points out for New York, the main reason, and since they used English perhaps the only reason, the Irish had for establishing parochial schools was to provide a sound religious education for their children. In all other respects their schools were so similar to public schools, as required by the state and encouraged by the Catholic hierarchy, that the Irish often questioned the reason for the schools' existence. Supporting parochial schools and paying taxes for public education constituted a great burden that many Irish had reason to view as not worthwhile. Religious training could be provided at home or in Church. At the same time public schooling provided the advantages of rubbing elbows with Yankees and being socialized in so-called mainstream ways.

It is precisely their value as instruments of socialization and transmitters of language and culture that made schools a major issue both for nativists who wished to use schools to Americanize immigrants and for minorities who wished to use schools to maintain their cultural heritages.

Fichter (1960:113) writes "it appears that Americanization of Catholics has not been one but several social processes", and lists those processes as socialization, accomodation, and assimilation or acculturation. In all of these processes, he sees a role for both the native-born and the newcomers. He defines socialization as the transmitting of culture from one generation to the next or from the native-born to the foreign-born, but goes on to say that the "individual 'takes on' the customs of the society in which he [or she] lives."In the process of accomodation, "groups interact in order to prevent, reduce, or eliminate conflict...which may eventually lead to positive cooperation." He defines assimilation or acculturation, as a "process through which persons or groups accept and perform one another'spatterns of behavior so that the resultant patterns are different from either of the two from which they originated" (my emphasis).

In general the native-born Americans tended to exert pressures on immigrants to conform to Anglo-Saxon mores. The differing Irish and French Canadian responses to these pressures can be explained partly by the religious, linguistic, and cultural history and resources they brought with them from their homelands.

The Fusion of Religion and Nationality

Fogarty (1957) coined the term societal competition to account for the high level of formal religious involvement and the salience of religious distinctiveness in Western European minority groups who differed not only religiously but also linguistically and culturally from a dominant group. Abramson (1973) claims that Fogartyís case would have been made even stronger had he looked at Ireland and Quebec, where societal competition with dominant British Protestants led both the Irish and the French Canadians to fuse their ethnic identity with their religious identity. 

In British-ruled Ireland, the Penal Laws of the late seventeenth and much of the eighteenth century restricted the funding of Catholicism and made its practice economically, socially and politically disadvantageous.[9]This was highly organized, codified societal competition. But many rich Irish Catholics opted not to compete, either leaving the country or becoming Protestant. The Catholic faith in Ireland was left for the most part to poor, uneducated tenant farmers and farm laborers. Though it played a major role in winning the repeal of the Penal Laws, the Church was not exactly an ally to its people in their relations with England. Clergy denounced the 1797-98 rebellion in which thousands of Catholics had died trying futilely to win Irelandís independence, excommunicated Irish nationalists and then almost unanimously supported the Act Of Union, obliterating any chance of nationhood. And even though the repeal of the Penal Laws really applied only to the remaining propertied Catholicsó making them 1) eligible for Parliamentary seats, other posts, military promotions, and protection for their property; and 2) just as able as Protestants to be unfair landlordsó the Church still managed to make the problems of poor Irish Catholics, the vast majority, look like problems caused not by class oppression, but by Protestant oppression (Miller, 1985).

The resultant Catholic self-consciousness translated into Irish nationalism (McAffrey, 1992:4), in part because it was both the cultural characteristic for which they had suffered the most and the attribute which had sustained them through their oppression (Ibson, 1990). But Miller (1985) points out some other important factors contributing to the fusion of Catholic identity with national identity: conversions and language loss. Conversions from Catholicism to Protestantism blurred ethnic divisions between Gaeils and Saxons. And official pressure to use English[10] caused the Gaeils to place increasing emphasis on religious rather than linguistic identity.

It seems to have been a tragic case of self-fulfilling prophecy that English writers considered the Irish to be English speakers long before it was actually true. Miller (1985:70) quotes Edward Wakefield as being astonished at feeling like a foreigner in Cork City in 1812. But Miller (1985:70) claims that as late as 1800 probably half of Irelandís population was at least bilingual and in 1812 there were still some two million people who could not understand English. This notion that the Irish spoke English persisted in America, even though as late as 1840 one-third of Irish children in the United States spoke Gaelic (McAffrey, 1990). Additionally, the paucity of books available in Irish (Miller, 1985:70) meant that literacy would be acquired in English. It seems that neither in their homeland or in America did the nineteenth- century Irish have ways to prevent the decline of their language.

Furthermore, Fallows (1979) claims that the Irish had developed a survival tactic of outward conformityin occupied Ireland. Because the Irish immigrants found themselves in close contact with Yankees through personal service occupationsóthis was particularly true for the many Irish women who actually lived as domestic servants with American familiesótheir opportunities to observe whatever manners and social graces their employers might have gave them an advantage in adapting to American ways that the insular French Canadians neither had nor seemed to want. 

On the other hand, because of their experience as Quebecís ìlarge, restless...minority [whose activities] guaranteed a more pluralistic approach to political and social issuesî in British North America (Miller, 1985:276), French Canadians' religious identity had fused with but not substituted for their ethnic identity. Perhaps the most important difference in terms of successful maintenance of linguistic identity was the supportive stance taken by the French Canadian Church for Québecois culture, completely unlike the role played by Irelandís Church.

A major factor in the fusion of religious and ethnic identity was New France's quasi-feudal[11] social ethos, which was consistent with the medieval ideals of the French Canadian Church. Both French Canada's feudalism and the Church's social organization rested on notions of reciprocity, mutual obligations, social hierarchy and inequality (Gerstle, 1989). As such, one could imagine that it would be hard to separate national ideals from religious ones because of a lack of societal competition. But as Fogarty's model would predict, the Church's cultural influence actually increased with the British conquest of New France in 1763. French Canadians resisted the English language and British Protestantism. The Church fused itself with emerging French-Canadian nationalism in rejecting an economy based on material progress. The Church preached that as North America's last remnant of Catholicism, French Canadians had a providential obligation to survive. La survivance became the defining characteristic of French Canadian nationalism (Gerstle, 1989). 

La survivanceled to successful language maintenance efforts in Canada, which Kloss (1966) views as a necessary prerequisite to immigrants' successful language maintenance efforts in their new country. I would add that la survivance maintained culture and religion as well (Guignard, 1982), but Kloss does not discuss these efforts. 

Those who became Franco-Americans kept la survivance foremost in their worldview. Some of the clergy who emigrated held onto illusions that New England would one day be annexed to an independent Québec (Parent, undated). Brault (1986) writes that Bishop Louis Joseph Goesbriand of Burlington, Vermont, saw the French Canadian migration as God's plan for converting New England. If such views had been widely shared by the French Canadian laity, it may have given real grounds for the nativists' fears about a Roman take-over of the United States. As it was, though religion truly infused their lives, lay emigrants saw themselves as preserving la survivance not through any such missionary or political work, but, more pragmatically and economically, through the preservation of la survivanceís basic unit: the family (Gerstle, 1989).

Nativism

Irish- and Franco-Americans each suffered unique ethnic prejudice in the United States. And for economic, political, and linguistic reasons each group harbored prejudice against the other as well. But together they endured what Higham (1955:79) calls one of the most highly organized xenophobias in American history: anti-Catholicism. Fichter (1960) points out that antagonism towards the Catholic Church in America did not develop until the middle of the eighteenth century, when the Church's composition became overwhelmingly immigrant. The antagonism then was primarily anti-immigrant, though he says that that did not make it any less anti-Catholic. Higham (1955) traces the major events, motivations, and methods of nativism, including the recurrent anti-Romanist movements. Relying a great deal on Higham's account, the following paragraphs discuss briefly the highlights of anti-Catholic thought and action.

In 1875, fully nine years before the Third Plenary Council would mandate a parochial school for every parish, but roughly thirty years after Bishop John Hughes' long battle for such monies (see page 5), President Ulysses S. Grant called for a constitutional amendment forbidding the use of public funds for denominational schools. Then during the 1876 election Republicans occasionally charged the Church with using the Democratic party to overthrow American public schools. It is interesting that these attacks were directed at clergy rather than at immigrants, a phenomenon Higham attributes to American confidence in inevitable assimilation and Americanization. He adds that anti-Catholics believed that it was the priests who drove the Irish into reluctant hostility toward public education and that if only priests did not keep them separate, the Irish would surely assimilate (Higham, 1955:29).

Assimilated or not, by the late 1880s Irish Catholics had begun their rise to political power, taking controlling positions in the Democratic Party (Hartford, 1990; Higham, 1955; Petrin, 1990). The shift of political power gave many Protestant Republicans all the evidence they needed that Catholics were trying to take over the nation (Higham, 1955:61). Political secret societies, whose members swore never to vote for a Catholic, sprang up endeavoring to curb Irish Catholic political power.

Nativist action and legislation intensified during the Depression of the 1890s. The amount of activity and laws aimed at schools, both public and parochial, reflects the nativists' recognition that immigrant groups could transmit and maintain their cultural differences through parochial schools and their own goal of effecting "Americanization" and assimilation through public education. Organized campaigns to envigorate "Americanism," including flag exercises with special pledges and salutes, spread throughout public schools in an effort to inculcate patriotism (Higham, 1955: 74-75). Some Catholic schools, especially those serving Irish clientele, responded by emphasizing patriotismóespecially the patriotic contributions of Catholicsóin their own textbooks and in some cases by outdoing public schools with the military zeal of their nationalistic curriculum (Weiscz, 1972).

The Church's "Response" to Nativism

Late nineteenth-century American Catholic history somewhat parallels late nineteenth-century American history. As Irish politicians wielded secular power, Irish clergy occupied most of the controlling positions in the American Church hierarchy (probably one reason why a political secret society, the American Protective Association, identified the Irish as the ìstandard bearersî of American Catholicism (Higham, 1955)). And like the rest of the U.S., the American Church had to deal with huge influxes of immigrants, because many of them were Catholic (see Linkh, 1975). And though none of the Church leaders were anti-Catholic of course, in dealing with immigrants, a clerical cleft developed along lines similar to, and perhaps in response to, that created by nativism in the wider American society. By the 1890s the episcopacy had divided into two ideological camps contesting the future of American Catholicism (Curran, 1976; Linkh, 1975), which camps can be looked at now as one that favored rapid assimilation, and one that saw maintenance of immigrant cultures as crucial to maintenance of the immigrantsí Catholic faith. In this contest, ìeducation became one of the key issuesî (Curran, 1976:44).

If not all Catholics complied with the Third Plenary Council to send their children to their parish's school, it could be related to the fact that not all Catholic leaders agreed with it. In the early 1890s Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul, Minnesota, was voicing different opinions from those expressed earlier by another Irish clergyman, Bishop John Hughes. One of Hughes's major themes throughout the New York school controversy had been that the very idea of common schooling was insufficient for raising Catholic children(Ravitch, 1974). Ireland, on the other hand, was willing to work out compromises with public school systems in Faribault and Stillwater, Minnesota. Under his Faribault plan, which was modelled on a similar arrangement in Poughkeepsie, the public school board would own the schools in which Catholic religious taught Catholic children. The only curriculum difference would be that religious instruction was to be offered only before or after regular school hours. 

Ireland's willingness to compromise arose mainly from his view of the role of the state in education. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Ireland believed that the State had an interest in the education of children and rightly made laws governing it. In fact, he felt that American society was in need of the moral influence of integrated Catholics. He felt it was important for Catholics to think of themselves as Americans first, and not to remain alien and unassimilated. 

Furthermore, Ireland came to be associated with language use controversies, especially regarding the German speaking population of Minnesota, who used German extensively in their parochial schools. He favored adoption of English on two major grounds: 1) that Germans themselves would fare better in the American milieu if they had a perfect command of the English language; and 2) that the Church would enjoy a bettter reputation in American society if it was regarded as a unified entity rather than a conglomeration of various unassimilated groups.

The relationship between Americanism and Catholicism could at times be very delicate. Ireland may have wanted Catholics to assimilate in order to influence American morals. But he also wanted Catholics to share in America's wealth, which he and many others, especially other Irish, felt would be best accomplished if not in public schools, at least in schools with much the same curriculum as public schools (Morrisey, 1976).

For the record, the bishops that shared Ireland's essential views wore the label "Liberals" and included Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore, Bishop John Lancaster Spalding of Peoria, Bishop John Keane, rector of the Catholic University of America, Bishop John Foley of Detroit, and Archbishop Patrick Riordan of San Francisco (Curran, 1976; Linkh, 1975). However, many "Conservative" hierarchy, led by Archbishops Michael Augustine Corrigan of New York and Frederick Katzer of Milwaukee vehemently opposed granting any educational rights to the State, believing that such rights belonged only to the parents and the Church.[12] A propaganda battle ensued, carried out in person in the United States, in New York newspapers, in European newspapers, in influential international Catholic newspapers, and through letters to and agents in Rome[13]. Even when the Vatican's special committee on the American school question concluded that Ireland's compromises could be tolerated considering "all the circumstances" (Curran, 1976:49), the Conservatives decided to see in this a sugar-coated condemnation. The Liberals and Conservatives again vied to explain what the consequences of this decision could be on the American political scene. Finally in 1899, Pope Leo XIII condemned the Americanism that called on the Catholic Church to modernize, to relax, to deemphasize religious vows, and to give greater scope to individuals (Hunt and Kunkel, 1984). By about 1910, Pope Leo XIII's warning against Americanism and the decreasing possibility of Catholic compromise with public schools left Catholics with only two choices: parochial or public schools.

Also at the beginning of the twentieth century, public schools, with the most notable exception of Milwaukee (Walch, 1988), became more reluctant to make special arrangements, for either ethnic groups or religious groups. The policy of unwillingness to accomodate special interests was more political than educational. It went along with the belief that Americanizing immigrants was desirable and even necessary, and with the belief that education was the way to Americanize them (Tyack, 1983).

Linguistic Nativism

Based as they were on the anti-Catholic sentiments prevalent in the 1890's, Corrigan's and Ireland's arguments about the political consequences of Pope Leo's decision had ceased to be relevant by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. New strains of xenophobia directed at incoming Italians, Jews, and Slavs began to replace Anti-Catholicism, at least in urban areas, after 1900 (Crawford, 1989; Higham, 1955). Though Midwestern states had discovered language legislation as a convenient weapon against parochial schools as early as the 1880s, its use became more widespread as a result of attitudes engendered by World War I (Crawford, 1989). Laws regulating language use in schools appeared on the books of twenty two states (D'Amours, 1938). A law in Nebraska[14] was written to abolish private schools (D'Amours, 1938). Laws in Oregon[15] (Jorgenson, 1968; D'Amours, 1938) and Wisconsin (Kloss, 1966) forbade the use of any language other than English as the language of instruction in schools, which especially affected German-language parochial schools(Kloss, 1966). Iowa[16] prohibited instruction in specified foreign languages and Ohio[17] prohibited instruction in German (D'Amours, 1938). Hawaii[18] wrote laws to regulate Japanese private schools (D'Amours, 1938). No New England states posted such drastic laws, but some public schools in heavily French Canadian parts of Maine punished students if they used French in school (Brault, 1986). Given that, and given that many of the lawsówhich only happened to affect Germans because of the states who made themówere actually written to prohibit instruction in any language other than English in private primary schools, New England's Franco-Americans had reason to ask what prevented such laws from being made anywhere and applied to any other minority.

In theory, as D'Amours (1938:275) points out, the right to use French as the language of instruction in New England's private primary schools finds its guarantee in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution, the Fourteenth Amendment reading in part "...nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..." The Constitutions of all six New England states contained similar provisions. Supreme Court precedents[19] served to pin down the phrase "without due process of law" to any act whose object is not in the interest of the common good, or whose means do not have substantial relation with the proposed ends, or which violates fundamental rights, or which is arbitrary, unreasonable or oppressive (D'Amours, 1938). Using these amendments and precedents, the Supreme Court overruled each of the aforesaid state laws. The decision which D'Amours found most comforting as a guarantee of Franco-Americans' right to use French in their private schools was that given in the case of Farrington v. Tokushige.[20] In this case, the Supreme Court qualified Hawaii's regulations as excessive and in conflict with the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees to parents the privilege to choose for their children an instruction which they consider important and which the government cannot call harmful. The decision affirmed that Japanese parents have the right to control their children's education without unreasonable restrictions.

D'Amours (1938: 280-283) outlines then how these assurances actually played out in New England state laws. Connecticut state law specified that foreign languages could not be used for more than one hour a day[21], and the Bureau that inspected private schools to make sure they were on a par with public schools included no Franco-Americans. In Connecticut, Franco-Americans had reason to fear that what the Constitution and the Supreme Court guaranteed in theory could not be obtained in practice. The laws of the five other states, while less restrictive, still caused D'Amours to doubt that French-language instruction could survive much longer. All required a minimum of eight years of education equal in quality to that provided by public schools. Vermont law made no mention of language of instruction except to say that the powers of its educational bureau could be interpreted to include regulation of such languages.[22] None of the five members of Vermont's bureau was Franco-American. Mainewrote that the language of instruction in private schools should be English, but that instruction in a foreign language was not prohibited.[23] Rhode Islandand Massachusetts, the state with the largest Franco-American population in New England (Petrin, 1990), both enumerated required courses, 7 and 15 respectively, and specified that these required courses must be taught in English.[24] New Hampshire, the state with the highest percentage of Franco-Americans in its population (Petrin, 1990), specified that in private schools English should be used exclusively, for instruction in 11 required courses and for general administrative purposes.[25] The instruction of a foreign language was allowed as long as it did not in any way diminish the instruction of the required courses.

Franco-American Viewpoints

What can it mean to call oneself Franco-American while holding la survivance as a top priority in life? It points to huge significance for that tiny little punctuation mark, the hyphen, in their name. The Franco-Americans' determined bilingualism, illustrated earlier with the extreme case of Woonsocket, indicates a desire to live in both cultures.

To see what their determined bilingualism meant for the Franco-Americans' parochials schools, it is interesting to start again from an extreme case. Joseph-Stanislas Vermette, a priest, curé of the parish of Saint Jean-Baptiste in Lynn, Massachusetts, seems to have held staunchly conservative views. He wrote about the conservation of the French language by schools in Massachusetts in 1936. Petrin (1990), writing about Massachusetts claims, arguably of course, that la survivance was irrelevant by the 1920s. If that is true, Vermette may even be called reactionary. External evidence aside, Vermette himself says, 

"Il va sans dire que je ne m'addresse pas a ceux qui ont opté pour l'américanisme dans le mauvais sens du mot et qui en ont assez de l'obéisance due aux parents et des prescriptions gênantes de l'Eglise et qui préferent de beaucoup le divorce au mariage chrétien, l'émancipation de la femme a son rôle de mere chrétienne et qui croient a toutes les doctrines modernes sous prétexte de progres."

(Vermette, 1936: 101)[26]

Still, in the same article containing these conservative sentiments, Vermette grants that the State, as well as the Church and the parents, has rights in education, and as such the language of the State, English, has a place in parochial schools. While it is true that he argues that the proportion of English to French in these schools should be one to two, it is impressive that even a very conservative Franco-American viewpoint holds a place for the government and the dominant language of the United States.

Having shown that even what appear to be extreme cases of Franco-American survivanceóWoonsocket (on page 13) and Vermette's pieceóleave room for bilingualism, it is useful to explore apparently more moderate views, as it is probable that more people held these. Vermette's views after all may have differed from those of his 1930s parishioners in Lynn as much as those of Goesbriand differed from the views of his 1880's Vermont flock. Clément Fréchette, a doctor, elite but not clergy, also writing in Massachusetts in 1936, asks and addresses a question whose very mention gives some balance to Petrin's claim, possibly also extreme, that la survivance was by then irrelevant:

"La langue française peut-elle se perpétuer aux Etats-Unis et surtout en Nouvelle-Angleterre? Je le crois. Ah! je ne dis pas indéfiniment...Mais si le français doit disparaître comme l'égyptien, le sanscrit, la langue hébraïque, le grec et le latin, il ne nous appartient pas d'en hâter la fin." (Fréchette, 1936:39)[27]

In several places, Fréchette notes the predictions made as much as forty years earlier that French would disappear among the Franco-Americans and rebuts them by pointing out the French-language activities of his contemporaries. As for the means through which Franco-Americans preserve their language, he lists first the Franco-American churches, second and third their colleges and parochial schools.

Fréchette, too, comes down solidly on the side of bilingualism. He claims that Franco-American schools differ only from public schools in that they are bilingual. He says that assimilationists insist that monolingualism is necessary for a country's peace and prosperity, and replies that nothing is more false. He calls assimilators "tartuffes" for saying that Franco-Americans should speak only English in order to be loyal to the United States. And still, in marked contrast to Vermette' one-to-two ratio, he assures them that "Ce n'est pas de notre intention de subordonner l'anglais au français, loin de la" (Fréchette, 1936:43).[28] He goes so far as to say that if they had to speak only one language, Franco-Americans would undoubtedly choose English, but that such is not the case, and that nothing prevents them from speaking two or three languages as long as they speak first of all the language of the country.

One nuance should be noted here. While Fréchette may have listed the churches as a means for safeguarding the French language, he was writing specifically about the language as a "vital organ" of la survivance. In no other Franco-American author have I found the church mentioned as a preserver of the language. Others write of the necessity of preserving the language in order to preserve the faith. Vermette (1936:104) for example, writes of "la langue française, fidele servante de la famille et de l'Eglise."[29] Parent (undated) and Guignard (1982) indicate that it was preached from the pulpit: "Lose your language and you lose your faith." The transmission of language served the transmission of religion. Catholicism was the priority. This cannot be mistaken when even a militant journalist like Elphege-J. Daignault (1936) writes war metaphors emphasizing the importance of "la survivance religeuse et française...la survivance catholique et canadienne française, en Amérique".[30] The results visible in 1992 confirm that their religion survived more authentically and more uniformly among the Franco-Americans than did their language.

These works were written in French by and to Franco-Americans. It is no secret that the assimilators targeted are not Americans in general. Many Franco-Americans were unhappy with the mainly Irish American hierarchy's official position supporting only English as the language of instruction in parochial schools, a position stated explicitly in editorial notices of Catholic School Journal and reinforced implicitly by the exclusion, until the addition of some articles addressing Spanish in the 1960s, of any articles addressing curriculum concerns of particular to bilingual schools. Though even a translation appears coded, it seems clear that Vermette (9136:96) is referring to the Irish when he explains 

"Ce n'est pas l'Etat qui nous fait la lutte, mais une race de politiciens en marge de l'autorité et qui pour vivre de l'Etat font du zele pour Lui."[31]

Directly addressing the political and legislative issues concerning bilingual schooling, D'Amours (1938) argues that greater allowances for the actual practice of the Constitutional right to use French in parochial schools would only be in keeping with the international trends of the post-World War I era allowing greater self-determination for minorities throughout Europe and embracing a philosophy of humane coexistence with the State. The facts of Franco-American bilingualism (Wessel, 1931) and the Franco-Americans' desire to inculcate good citizenship through their parochial schools (Brault, 1986; D'Amours, 1938) show that the Franco-Americans asked not for the license to remain un-American but for a chance to contribute to the cultural plurality of America.

This paper has surveyed the reasons why the Vatican allowed the Church in America to cope with the problems of immigration by setting up ìnationalî as opposed to geographic parishes, and looked at the factors which led three Plenary Councils to insist that each parish build a parochial school and that all Catholic parents send their children to their parochial school.

I have taken the view that since parishes were based on ethnicity, one can look at compliance with the school-in-every-parish rule as a reflection of ethnic values, as indeed, Cross (1965), Perlmann (1988), and others have done. In that the French Canadians are portrayed in the literature as ìzealousî establishers of parochial schools (Cross, 1965), and the Irish as more interested in building fancy churches while delaying construction of parochial schools or using public schools (Sanders, 1985), the basic elements of Somersworthís case seem rather typical.

I have argued that some of the differences between Irish and Franco-American tendencies in building churches and parochial schools are related to each groupís cultural characteristics and their experience with cultural maintenance in their homeland, as well as to their reception in America and their attitudes toward becoming American. It seems since the waning of their language had already begun in their homeland, the Irish were not well-prepared to save it in a foreign land. Furthermore, the Church in Ireland seemed willing to sell out national principles in favor of Catholic rights. In the United States, the Irish tendencies to conform, at least outwardly (Fallows, 1979), and to be more dependent than independent, more communal than individualistic, more fatalistic than optimistic and more prone to accept conditions passively than to initiate change (Miller, 1985:107), probably all combined to further accelerate at least the appearance of assimilation, which, as New Englandís first huge group of religiously distinct immigrants, could have been more intensely foisted on them than on the French Canadians. Sending children to public school was not only reasonable economically, but it aided children in acquiring Yankee ways.

But even if the French Canadians did experience the same pressure to assimilate, their success in maintaining their language, religion, and culture as a minority in Canada had equipped them with the experience Kloss (1966) deems so crucial to similar success in an adopted land. More than experience, the French Canadian Church, unlike the Irish Church, had given the French Canadians a mission, the providential obligation to survive, la survivance. For the French Canadians who finally stayed, quickly establishing their own parochial schools, and incidentally other Franco institutions, helped them maintain their culture, and therefore their religion in America.

So I now have a broader understanding of the reasons why Somersworth has two Catholic parishes, and why Somersworthís Irish might have waited 59 years to build their school while the Franco-Americans waited just one year to build theirs. It seems then that looking further into Somersworthís particular case may help increase our understanding of the micro-level decisions that underlay these parochial school trends in New England.