As AU’s lawsuits challenging Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas laws requiring placement of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom make their way through the appeals process and speculation grows about a potential reversal of the Supreme Court’s 1980 Stone v. Graham ruling barring their display, a look back to 1859 provides a reminder of just how divisive such mandates can be, and of the importance of protest.
On March 14, 1859, 10-year-old Thomas J. Whall took a beating for religious freedom.
Thomas was a pupil at Boston’s Eliot School, which required the school’s 900 students, three quarters of whom, like Thomas, were Irish Catholics, to recite the Ten Commandments every Monday.
On March 7, after a half dozen Protestant boys recited, Thomas’ turn came. On instructions from his parish priest, he began to recite the Catholic Douay–Rheims Bible version of the Decalogue, which differs slightly from the King James text required by the school. His teacher summoned the principal, Samuel Mason, and when the boy explained that he had been told by his father not to recite from the Protestant Bible, he was sent home.
After William Whall appeared with two fellow parishioners that afternoon to discuss the matter, his son was readmitted. He left satisfied, under the impression that Mason had agreed not to require Catholic children to recite from the Protestant Bible in the future.
The following Monday saw a repeat of the incident, however. This time, Thomas’ teacher sent for the vice principal, McLaurin F. Cooke, who demanded that any student who refused to recite stand up. Twenty boys rose. When Thomas stated that he would do as asked only if his father approved it, Cooke countered that his father’s instructions were law in his home, but at school Cooke was the authority.
He then pulled the boy, whom he believed to be the ringleader, out of the classroom and thrashed his hands with a rattan switch for half an hour until they had swollen to twice their normal size. Together with about a hundred other Catholic boys who by this time had also refused to recite, Thomas was then expelled.
William Whall’s first impulse was to seek Cooke out and pummel him, but he decided instead to sue the vice principal for assault and battery, causing his arrest. When Principal Mason took the stand at Cooke’s trial, he denied ever agreeing to excuse Catholic children from reciting prayers and insisted that Whall had given his permission for school authorities to discipline his son if he failed to comply with school rules.
Counsel for the boy argued that he had been punished excessively and in violation of his rights. The state constitution guaranteed that no one, not even an instructor in a public school, could require him to act contrary to his religious beliefs. And he insisted that the beating had been an abuse of authority because the teacher had been told the boy was acting in accordance with his father’s wishes. The school did not have the right to “whip the boy out of his religious beliefs,” he argued.
The defense, in a three-hour tirade, painted a dark, deeply anti-Catholic, and largely irrelevant picture of a conspiracy on the part of “alien immigrants” to “drive the Bible from our schools.” And he defended the right of the school to discipline what he called a “profane and rather dirty little boy” who had willfully broken its rules.
To the consternation of the Catholic community, the court acquitted Cooke. Through legal gymnastics, it found that because the Bible had been placed in the schools for the moral education of children and not for sectarian purposes, it did not violate the state constitution, and that Thomas’ insubordination had justified his punishment. In defiance, young Whall’s church, deeming him a “young sufferer for his faith,” awarded him a gold medal in the shape of a Maltese cross.
The following year, the school committee, surely embarrassed over the national publicity the incident had garnered, quietly modified its recommendation. It relegated responsibility for Bible reading and recitation of the Lord’s Prayer to the teachers and struck all references to the Ten Commandments, including any obligation for students to recite them.
It was a small victory, but it was something.
The lesson of what is known as the Eliot School rebellion is twofold. It illustrates how contentious the imposition of one group’s religious practices can be when imposed by law on another. And it testifies to the value of protest, without which surely nothing would have changed.
Scott D. Seligman is a writer with a special interest in the history of hyphenated Americans. His most recent book, The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906, chronicles a turn-of-the-century Jewish protest of public school Christmas celebrations. The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily represent the views of Americans United.
