Cincinnati Bible War | 1 2 3
"It was very respectable then to be anti-Catholic," notes University of Cincinnati history professor Linda Przybyszewski. "Neighborhoods were often segregated. In 1844, after Cincinnati newspapers carried stories of anti-Catholic riots on the east coast, a group of men threw sticks and rocks at a house occupied by Catholic clergy, according to a German priest who had immigrated to Cincinnati."
Even the Rev. Lyman Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe's father, was a vocal opponent of Catholics. Considered a progressive thinker because he was a black abolitionist and the founder of a Cincinnati seminary, Beecher preached a "papal conspiracy theory" that Catholics would take over the West.
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the Cincinnati Bible War was raging, this pair of cartoons, drawn
by the famous cartoonist Thomas Nast, appeared in the Feb. 19, 1870,
edition of Harper's Weekly. Associate history professor Linda
Przybyszewski explains, "The top drawing depicts Europe as a
place where Catholic domination has been thwarted by the heads of
state, and the alliance of church and state has been destroyed to
the distress of the pope, who collapses. The bottom drawing depicts
Catholic Americans as using vote fraud in their efforts to patch together
that severed alliance of church and state."
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Most American public schools, including Cincinnati's, had been founded by ministers and their wives who started Protestant churches at the same time, the professor explains. "From the very beginning, the country's entire public school system was imbued with Protestant ethics."
Of course, having a Protestant slant on education raises more questions than whether your Bible contains the books of Tobit and Judith. "If you're using textbooks, you either have a textbook that thinks the reformation is the most wonderful thing that ever happened, which is the Protestant version, or you have the Catholic version, which doesn't think it was such a great idea after all," she says. "Which one do you want to go for? If you're using Christian literature, are you going to use St. Augustine or Martin Luther?"
The 1869 Board of Education went for the cost-effective solution to quiet the Catholics. It threw out the Bible.
Thousands of irate people, including men with names like Shillito and Covington -- the "choicest of our citizens," according to the Daily Times newspaper -- sued the board. In November, the local Superior Court ruled in their favor, agreeing the board had overstepped its authority.
The board, of course, appealed. In 1872, the Ohio Supreme Court overturned the lower court decision, saying it was within the school board's discretion to ban the Bible. "Government is an organization for particular purposes," wrote Justice John Welch. "It is not almighty, and we are not to look to it for everything.
"The great bulk of human affairs ... is left by any free government to ... individual action. Religion is eminently one of those interests, lying outside the true and legitimate province of government."
Even though Przybyszewski says other areas of the country were struggling with the same issue, Cincinnati drew the nation's eye because of its reputation. "Before the Civil War, Cincinnati is a frontier," she says. "The West becomes the place where everyone sees the future. This is the place where problems need to be worked out."
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