Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2

by George Frisbie Hoar

I ought to say, however, of this movement and of the A. P. A. movement, as it is called, of which I am now to speak, that I do not think the leaders in general shared the bitter and proscriptive feeling to which they appealed. The secret organization, founded on religious prejudice, or on race prejudice, is a good instrument to advance the political fortunes of men who could not gain advancement in an established political organization. So a great many men are active and busy in such organizations, who would be equally active and busy in movements founded on precisely the opposite doctrines, if they could as well find their advancement in them. Yet, as I have said, the prejudice which lay at the bottom of this movement was very powerful, very sincere, and not unnatural.

Secret societies were formed all over the country. It seemed not unlikely that the surprise of 1854 would be repeated, and that the great Republican party, which had done so much for civil liberty, would either be broken to pieces or would be brought to take an attitude totally inconsistent with religious liberty.

The organization, calling itself the American Protective Association, but known popularly as the A. P. A., had its branches all over the North. Its members met in secret, selected their candidates in secret—generally excluding all men who were not known to sympathize with them—and then attended the Republican caucuses to support candidates in whose selection members of that political party who were not in their secret councils had no share. Ambitious candidates for office did not like to encounter such a powerful enmity. They in many cases temporized or coquetted with the A. P. A. if they did not profess to approve its doctrine. So far as I know, no prominent Republican in any part of the country put himself publicly on record as attacking this vicious brotherhood. Many men who did not agree with it were, doubtless, so strong in the public esteem that they were not attacked.

That was the condition of things when, in the early summer of 1895, I delivered an address at the opening of the Summer School of Clark University in which I spoke briefly, but in very strong terms, in condemnation of the secrecy and of the proscriptive principles of this political organization. I declared: "I have no patience or tolerance with the spirit which would excite religious strife. It is as much out of place as the witchcraft delusion or the fires of Smithfield." I added: "This Nation is a composite. It is made up of many streams, of the twisting and winding of many bands. The quality, hope and destiny of our land is expressed in the phrase of our Fathers, 'E Pluribus Unum'—of many, one—of many States, one Nation—of many races, one people—of many creeds, one faith—of many bended knees, one family of God." A little later I went with the Massachusetts Club, of which I was a member, to an outing at Newport. There, briefly but still more emphatically, I called upon the people not to revive the bitter memories of ancient, social and religious strife.

These two speeches excited the indignation of the leaders of this organization. A gentleman named Evans, I believe born in England, took up the cudgels. He was supported by many worthy clergymen and a good many newspapers which had been established to support the doctrine of the A. P. A. organization. Mr. Evans, if I am right in my memory, claimed that he was not a member of the organization. But he stood up for it stanchly in two letters to me, in which he very severely denounced what I had said, and pointed out the wicked behavior of some Catholic priests to whom he referred. He said he had looked up to me as he formerly did to Charles Sumner and William H. Seward; that my course would tend as absolutely to the breaking up of the Republican Party as Daniel Webster's speech did to the breaking up of the old Whig Party, and that I had rung my own death knell; that the one mistake Wesley made when he called slavery "the sum of all villainies" was that he did not except the Roman Catholic Church. He added that there were at least three million members of these patriotic orders, constituting at least three fifths of the Republican Party, and that their membership was being added to daily. Mr. Evans also said, what was absolutely without foundation, that I had said, "We need a Father Confessor."

That gave me my opportunity. I answered with the following letter in which I stated my own doctrine as vigorously and clearly as I knew how.

WORCESTER, Aug. 5, 1895.
T. C. EVANS, ESQ.:

My Dear Sir—One of the great evils, though by no means the greatest evil of secret political societies, is that foolish and extravagant statements about men who don't agree with them get circulated without opportunity for contradiction or explanation. You seem to be a well-meaning and intelligent man; yet I am amazed that any well-meaning and intelligent man should believe such stuff as you repeat in your letter of August 3. I never said, thought or dreamed what you impute to me. I don't believe there ever was any report in the Worcester Telegram to that effect. Certainly there is none in the report of what I said in the summer school at Clark University the morning after, and there is no such statement in any of the other Worcester newspapers. I never anywhere expressed the idea that there should be a confessional or that there was any need of a Father Confessor, or that I wanted to see something in our Protestant churches like the Father Confessor in the Catholic. The whole thing is a miserable lie and invention made out of whole cloth. The language, which you quote, about an attempt to recall on one side, "the cruelties of the Catholic Church and frighten our women and children with horrid hobgoblins," is not my language. That does appear in the Telegram. But it is the reporter's statement of what he understood my idea to be in his own language. What I said was: "We are confronted with a public danger which comes from an attempt to rouse the old feelings of the dark ages, and which ought to have ended with them, between men who have different forms of faith. It is an attempt to recall on one side the cruelties of the Catholic Church and to frighten old women of both sexes, and, on the other side, to band the men of the Catholic Church together for political action. Both these attempts will fail."

There is no more zealous believer in the principles of the New England Puritans, and no more zealous advocate of them, than I am. There is not a man in Massachusetts who has more at heart the welfare and perpetuity of our system of free common schools than I have. I was the first person, so far as I know, who called public attention to the fact that they were in danger, in any formal way. I drew and had put in the platform of the Republican State Convention the following resolution: "The Republican Party ever has maintained and ever will maintain and defend, the common schools of Massachusetts as the very citadel of happiness. They shall be kept open to all the children and free from all partisan and sectarian control."

This doctrine I stand by. And I stand by the further doctrine, as I stated at length in my address at Clark University, that the whole resources of the Commonwealth are pledged to their support, and that that is the bottom mortgage on every dollar of our property, and that no person can escape or be allowed to escape that responsibility. The difference between you and me is a difference of method. I want to get the 700,000 Catholics in Massachusetts on our side. I want them to send their children to the public schools, to pay their share of the cost, and when their young men and women are suitable, are intelligent, liberal persons, attached to the school system, I want some of them to be employed as teachers. I don't wish to exclude them from my political support when they are Republicans and agree with me in other matters, because of their religious faith. Nor do I wish to exclude them from being public school teachers, if they will keep their particular religious tenets out of their instruction, because of their religious faith, any more than I would have excluded Phil Sheridan from his office in the army, or would have refused to support him for any public office, if he had been nominated for it. Further, I want to state and advocate my opinions in the face of day, and you may be sure that I shall do this without flinching before anybody's threats or anybody's displeasure or indignation. You, on the other hand, I understand, want to go into a cellar to declare your principles. You want to join an association whose members are ashamed to confess they belong to it; many of whom, without apparently forfeiting the respect of their fellows, lie about their membership in it when they are asked about it. You want to mass together the whole Catholic population of Massachusetts to the support of their extreme and wrong- headed priests, if any such can be found.