and passions of the human heart. There were many towns in
New England and in the West where Roman Catholicism was unknown except
as a traditional enemy of free institutions. It is difficult to
realize in these days of tolerance the feelings aroused in such
communities when Catholic churches, parochial schools, and convents
began to appear among them; and when the devotees of this faith
displayed a genius for practical politics, instinctive distrust
developed into lively suspicion.

The specter of ecclesiastical authority reared itself, and the
question of sharing public school moneys with parochial schools and of
reading the Bible in the public schools became a burning issue. Here
and there occurred clashes that were more than barroom brawls.
Organized gangs infested the cities. Both sides were sustained and
encouraged by partisan papers, and on several occasions the antagonism
spent themselves in riots and destruction. In 1834 the Ursuline
convent at Charlestown, near Boston, was sacked and burned. Ten years
later occurred the great anti-Irish riots in Philadelphia, in which
two Catholic churches and a schoolhouse were burned by a mob inflamed
to hysteria by one of the leaders who held up a torn American flag and
shouted, "This is the flag that was trampled on by Irish papists."
Prejudice accompanied fear into every city and "patented citizens"
were often subject to abuse and even persecution. Tammany Hall in New
York City became the political fortress of the Irish. Election riots
of the first magnitude were part of the routine of elections, and the
"Bloody Sixth Ward Boys" were notorious for their hooliganism on
election day.

The suggestions of the nativists that paupers and criminals be
excluded from immigration were not embodied into law. The movement
soon was lost in the greater questions which slavery was thrusting
into the foreground. When the fight with nativism was over, the Irish
were in possession of the cities. They displayed an amazing aptitude
for political plotting and organization and for that prime essential
to political success popularly known as "mixing." Policemen and
aldermen, ward heelers, bosses, and mayors, were known by their
brogue. The Irish demonstrated their loyalty to the Union in the Civil
War and merged readily into American life after the lurid prejudices
against them faded.

Unfortunately, a great deal of this prejudice was revived when the
secret workings of an Irish organization