Fighting the Philistines: Bishop John Purcell, the Catholic Disruption of the 1830s, and the Making of Memory

Abstract

Abstract:The national dispute that came to be called the Bible War erupted in 1869 when the Cincinnati school board voted to end Bible reading in its schools. The opening salvos of the war, however, began not in the 1860s, but in the 1830s. The Western Literary Institute and College of Professional Teachers championed the public-school movement in the West from 1831 to 1840 when Catholic Bishop John Baptist Purcell disrupted the organization's Protestant hegemony. While struggles in New York City and Philadelphia during the 1840s overshadow Cincinnati historiographically, the College of Teachers' meetings set the pattern for later sectarian disputes over public education in the Old Northwest. Protestant belief in the priestly monopoly over the Bible and in Catholicism as a threat to civil and religious liberty and education undermined the legitimacy of Catholic challenges to Protestant Bibles in the schools. These sectarian beliefs drew on, and became part of, a mythic history already existent and still on display during the Bible War when Rev. Benjamin P. Aydelott recounted his dispute with Purcell as a dramatic struggle over the fate of the nation. Sectarian myth made the Protestant Bible essential to American educational progress in popular and legal memory.