Someone said, "Cities are primordially political. Thus they become unable to be more sophisticated and moral than the lowest component of their societies." Surely such a gloomy prospect worried Cleveland's leaders.

A promising way to avoid this awful outcome was offered by Horace Mann, an evangelist for American public schools. He called it "Americanization."

For Mann, America was a Protestant country and God wanted to keep it that way. Catholic children would not grow up to infect the country with Papist lore if they were taught Protestant mores in public schools. These schools, he said, would be "nurseries of piety for Catholic children, where judicious religious instruction is dispensed, using the King James' version of the Bible." Thus would public schools eradicate Catholic children's "superstitious inheritance of priestcraft" and "dependency on authoritarianism."

Bible interpretation sharply divided Protestants from Catholics. Whereas the former are encouraged to read the bible and learn God's intentions from it, the latter believe the Church's priests should interpret the bible for the congregations. Furthermore, the King James version is considered an illegitimate text by the Catholic Church.

In Cleveland, where one-third of the children were Catholic, Mann's ideology was embraced enthusiastically. Under pressure from Cleveland's leaders, the Ohio State Teachers' Association mandated use of the King James Bible in Ohio classrooms and encouraged employment of teachers who are steadfast Protestants. The situation is described in the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, a non-sectarian source, as follows:

"The tone of public schools was often hostile to Catholicism, and Catholic children were sometimes ridiculed because of their religion. Public school teachers were almost invariably Protestant."

It was the size of the Catholic population that scared Cleveland's elite, and it was the size that defeated their attempt to rectify Catholic children in public schools. So many Catholics in a city qualified them to become a diocese with their own bishop. Cleveland's first bishop, Louis

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Amadeus Rappe, was as zealous about erecting parochial

schools "to save the childrens' faith," as the city's leaders were about saving their own faith by converting Catholic children to Protestantism.

Bishop Rappe agreed that Catholic children should be Americanized, but he also believed Catholicism and Americanization were compatible. The problem of Catholic immigrants, he said, is not religious; the problem is ethnic insularity. He proposed redistricting parishes so that ethnic groups would be mixed with one another in parishes where only English would be used in schools and social activities.

If Cleveland's leaders thought Rappe gave them a consolation prize, the comfort soon vanished. Ethnic groups refused to go along with gerrymandering parishes so that, for example, part of a Polish neighborhood would be in a parish with part of a Hungarian neighborhood, all speaking English. They demanded unity of parish and nationality and the use of native language for everything except the Holy Mass. Though the Irish were at peace with the English-only rule, they wanted Irish parishes with Irish priests and nuns, so they joined the others to defeat the Bishop's plan. The language issue was resolved over the following fifty or so years when parents came to realize that children schooled in their native languages were ill-prepared for success in America.

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