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| Rev. Burchard single-handedly lost the election. |
Unfortunately,
in his welcoming speech, the Reverend Samuel Dickerson Burchard (1812-1891)
declared, “We are Republicans and don’t propose to leave our Party and identify
ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been Rum, Romanism and
Rebellion.”[1]
The sentiment
was not original with Burchard. During
the 1880 election, the Republican candidate James Garfield had written in a
letter to a supporter, “the combined power of rebellion, Catholicism and
whiskey [is] a trinity very hard to conquer.”[2]
Blaine at
first appeared to take no notice of the statement. A little later in the proceedings, however,
he commented to the event’s organizer, James King, “That ‘Rum, Romanism and
Rebellion’ remark is exceedingly unfortunate.”[3]
The damage,
however, had been done. The Democratic
Party’s New York press agents immediately printed pamphlets and flooded the
city. Within a few days, tens of
thousands of them had been distributed throughout the Northeast, the bulk of
them to Catholics following Mass on Sunday, November 2, 1884, just before
Election Day.
 |
| James G. Blaine noted the "exceedingly unfortunate" remark. |
Efforts to get
Burchard to apologize for his statement were unavailing. Despite that, the results were so close that
had Blaine been able to carry New York, he would have been elected. When the votes were counted, however, it was
found that the Democratic candidate, Grover Cleveland, had won New York with a
margin of less than 1,200 votes.
Ironically,
while “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion” cost Blaine the election and is virtually
the only thing most people today remember about him — even though he wasn’t the
one to say it — the three Rs that concerned most people about the Catholic
Church in the latter half of the nineteenth century were Readin’, ’Ritin’, and
’Rithmetic. From the time of the First
Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1852 that urged the establishment of parochial
schools, Know-Nothings and their nativist sympathizers had portrayed the
nascent Catholic school system in varying degrees of hysteria as the single
greatest danger to the United States.
The explosive
growth of the Church in the United States had resulted in the equally rapid
establishment of Catholic institutions as well as voters without a private
property stake in the economy, and therefore liable to having their votes
purchased after the extension of the franchise in 1820. Schools, hospitals, and orphanages
proliferated. Along with that came the
demand from Catholics that, as these institutions provided a necessary public
service and relieved the government of the expense of having to establish and
maintain its own institutions, the government should contribute something to
their maintenance.
 |
| Public schools if Catholics took over, according to nativist fears. |
There was also
the argument that without state financial aid, parents who sent their children
to Catholic schools were forced to pay twice for education, in public school taxes
and in tuition. Further, the Bible used
in the public schools was the King James Version, which, while venerable and
poetic, distorted or changed Catholic teaching.
Finally, as parents are primarily responsible for their children’s
education, simple justice demanded that the taxes they paid for education be
used to pay for the education they preferred.
A compromise
that worked well for a number of years was “the Poughkeepsie Plan,” implemented
in New York, Connecticut, and parts of the Midwest. A local school board would build a school and
staff it with qualified Catholic sisters and lay teachers. During the day the official curriculum would
be taught, while religious instruction would be offered after hours on a
strictly voluntary basis. While successful
in some areas, protests by nativists and radical Protestants prevented it from
being widely adopted.
 |
| To the nativists, it was impossible for a good Catholic to be a good citizen. |
The argument
on the other side was twofold. The
first, and the one that continues to the present day, is that separation of
Church and State in the Constitution requires the government to maintain a
strict neutrality in matters of religion.
This is the case even in those areas where a religious organization
provides an essential public service and no specific religious doctrines or
teachings are promulgated. Thus, mere
association with a religious organization, Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish, was
enough to mandate that there be no public funding, even if most or all of the
services provided had nothing to do with any specific religious tenet.
 |
| Fr. McGlynn: Catholic schools are un-American. |
The second,
and the one that whipped nativists into a frenzy, was the specious claim that
Catholic schools were inferior and prevented the enculturation of Catholic
children as good Americans. Catholic
schools and other institutions must not only receive no government funds, they
must be outlawed. As Father Edward McGlynn
and others contended, the doctrines taught in Catholic schools were
un-American, and they would cause Catholics to vote for candidates for public
office who would destroy the country.
While most
people opposed to aid to religious schools based their position on a
combination of these two arguments, the second revealed what was really at
stake. The question was not whom
Catholics would control with their vote, but who would control the Catholic
vote. Most Catholics lacked property,
and thus power, and would vote for whoever would deliver the most benefits —
“Welfare Blackmail” did not come in with the New Deal.
#30#