Notre Dame vs. The Klan

How the Fighting Irish Defied the KKK

Todd Tucker

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780268104344
• eBook ISBN: 9780268104368
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In 1924, two uniquely American institutions clashed in northern Indiana: the University of Notre Dame and the Ku Klux Klan. Todd Tucker's book, published for the first time in paperback, Notre Dame vs. The Klan tells the shocking story of the three-day confrontation in the streets of South Bend, Indiana, that would change both institutions forever.

When the Ku Klux Klan announced plans to stage a parade and rally in South Bend, hoping to target college campuses for recruitment starting with Notre Dame, a large group of students defied their leaders' pleas to ignore the Klan and remain on campus. Tucker dramatically recounts the events as only a proficient storyteller can. Readers will find themselves drawn into the fray of these tumultuous times.

Tucker structures this compelling tale around three individuals: D.C. Stephenson, the leader of the KKK in Indiana, the state with the largest Klan membership in America; Fr. Matthew Walsh, the young and charismatic president of the University of Notre Dame; and a composite of a Notre Dame student at the time, represented by Bill Foohey, who was an actual participant in the clash.

This book will appeal not only to Notre Dame fans, but to those interested in South Bend and Indiana history and the history of the Klu Klux Klan, including modern-day Klan violence.

1	THE ANTAGONISTS

IN JUNE OF 1893, THE HOLY CROSS BROTHERS WHO RAN St. Columbkille’s School in Chicago lined their boys up and marched them by a tired-looking priest. Their distinguished visitor was Fr. Thomas Walsh, the president of the University of Notre Dame, the most esteemed Catholic school in the country. He suffered from Bright’s disease and was visibly ill; in fact, he would live less than a month longer. The brothers hoped that a parade of their youngsters might cheer him up.¹

Like the rest of the boys, young Matthew Walsh concentrated on becoming invisible as he marched past the priest. It was not to be.

“Come here, Matthew,” said Br. Marcellinus. Walsh reluctantly stepped forward. As the school’s most promising student, he was frequently called on to recite for visitors the five sorrowful mysteries, the seven dolors of Mary, the fourteen stations of the cross, or any of the other memorized lists that characterized his religious instruction. Such performances were usually followed by teasing and taunts of “teacher’s pet” on the playground.

“Fr. Walsh, this is Matthew Walsh,” said the brother, seeming amused by the coincidence of their last names. The priest smiled weakly as he patted the boy’s head. He looked as if he barely had the energy to stand.

“Pleased to meet you, Father,” said Walsh. The priest nodded.

“Fr. Walsh is the president of the University of Notre Dame,” said Br. Marcellinus to the entire class. He swept his hand dramatically across the room, stopping at a picture of Notre Dame’s famous Golden Dome hanging on the rear wall. The brothers of St. Columbkille’s, as Walsh and the other boys well knew, belonged to the Congregation of Holy Cross, the same order that ran Notre Dame. Good behavior in the classroom—often by Matthew Walsh—was rewarded by the compliment that there might someday be a place for such a youngster at the great Catholic university.

Although the teasing kept him from saying so aloud, the young Walsh hoped the prophecy would come true. His parents hoped so too. For a boy from a family like theirs—immigrant and poor—to go to college at all would be a great achievement.

Matthew Walsh’s father, David Walsh, was born in Mitchells-town, County Cork, Ireland. His mother, Joanna Clogan, born in Troy, New York, was also of pure Irish stock. Walsh’s father was part of the vast human wave that left Ireland in the nineteenth century, fleeing famine, British oppression, and economic hopelessness. In the years between 1845 and 1855, more Irish left their country than had previously emigrated in the country’s entire recorded history.² The Irish had few illusions about ever returning to the mother country. Of all the ethnic groups streaming into America, only the Jews had a lower return rate than the Irish.³ In nearly every large city in America, the Irish claimed neighborhoods as their own by crowding the tenements, building churches, and winning political offices. The Walshes settled in West Town, Chicago, a neighborhood where it was not at all remarkable to find people named Walsh—or Murphy, or Kelly, or Sullivan, for that matter, the only Irish surnames more common.⁴ Even the parish’s patron, St. Columbkille, was an Irish import, a rash prince who became a holy man in exile.

An array of stereotypes followed the Irish to the New World, most revolving around the twin activities of drinking and brawling. No one knew better than the Irish themselves that there was a grain of truth to these prejudices. Irish boys did tend to become wilder as they got older and were quick to fight. There was unquestionably an element among them that did more than its share of drinking. The Walshes encouraged the quiet studiousness of Matthew, the seventh of their ten children, in part because it was so rare.

Walsh was born on May 14, 1882, in Chicago. From the start, he impressed every adult in his life. His parents hoped that his academic achievements might earn him a place at Notre Dame. To get into college, though, Matthew would need more than stellar grades and scholastic performance. He would have to fulfill an even greater dream of his parents, neighbors, and teachers: he would have to become a priest. Joining a religious order was just about the only avenue to a higher education for children of immigrants in America at the time.

The Walshes believed that such a life brought great spiritual rewards. Priests dealt with “sacred matters in a sacred language.”⁵ They welcomed babies into the church with baptism and administered the last rites to the dying. By virtue of having been called to a life in Christ, parish priests had unequivocal authority within their communities. Their authority was rooted in the fact that they could do something that no one else on earth could—they could celebrate Mass.

For a family like the Walshes, there were considerable earthly rewards to the priesthood as well. Not only would the door to higher education be opened for a young man who wanted to become a priest, but his family would also be treated with great respect and admiration within their community. Large Catholic families like the Walshes were not unusual at the turn of the century, nor were their priorities. Seminary applicants were plentiful, and thus the seminaries could afford to be highly selective in choosing whom they committed to feed, clothe, educate, and employ for a lifetime. Matthew Walsh’s acceptance into the seminary would bring great credit to his parents and teachers. In addition to being educated and esteemed as a priest, Walsh would enjoy a standard of living that would be a measure higher than what his siblings experienced; he’d perhaps even have a laundress, a cook, and a housekeeper.⁶ Matthew Walsh’s family and teachers made sure that he knew from a very young age to listen closely for a call to the priesthood.

The center of Walsh’s community, both literally and figuratively, was St. Columbkille’s Church. Division Street, Lake Street, Hoyne Avenue, and May Street formed the boundaries of the parish, an area roughly fifteen city blocks on a side.⁷ The Catholicism that Walsh learned there was as rigidly defined as the parish boundaries. Families in the parish were expected to rent pews. The pews were reserved until just after the first Gospel reading, by which time everyone could see which families were absent. The pews were then made available to nonrenters in exchange for a “voluntary” offering of ten cents. No marriage ceremony would be performed after 5:00 pm. Funerals had to be arranged by family members, not by the undertaker. Parishioners wishing to donate money to Catholic causes outside the parish needed written permission from the pastor. Every aspect of church life was regulated with cheerful fervor by the church’s rector, Fr. Nathan Mooney, Notre Dame class of 1877.⁸

In 1896, at the age of fourteen, Walsh completed grammar school and moved up to the brothers’ high school. As the rest of the boys in school got louder and bigger, his reticence grew even more conspicuous. Unlike his swearing, brawling peers in West Town, Walsh was becoming a young man who could absolutely swim in silence. Walsh’s grades, demeanor, and piety all seemed to confirm what religious men had been telling him all his life: he was different. At the dawn of adolescence, his self-awareness became acute. In 1897, after completing a single year of high school, Matthew Walsh fulfilled the expectations of everyone around him. He announced to his family that he would like to join the priesthood. The choice of orders was clear. The Holy Cross brothers of St. Columbkille’s scurried to enroll him in the seminary at Notre Dame. He was fifteen years old.

Walsh left for Notre Dame in the summer of 1897. He and his mother took the train from Chicago to South Bend, Indiana, the home of Notre Dame and Walsh’s home for the next six years. To Walsh, who had been a city boy all his life, the trip was like traveling into a great wilderness—he watched out the window as the northern Indiana forests and the shore of Lake Michigan rushed by him. It was a quiet trip. Walsh’s mother would occasionally clear her throat or gather her breath as if she was about to speak, but she never did. At the train station in South Bend, they boarded a horsedrawn carriage for the two-mile trip to campus. Walsh recounted his arrival at Notre Dame years later to his friend and Notre Dame historian Arthur Hope, who included the story in his book Notre Dame: One Hundred Years.

“We need to go to Notre Dame,” his mother told the driver. “My boy is going to be a priest.”

“Very good,” said the driver as he snapped the reins and started them forward. Walsh could tell that his mother had expected a more energetic response.

The carriage soon pulled up to the steps of the domed Main Building, the same building pictured in the photograph that hung on the wall of Walsh’s grammar school classroom. The breath-taking architecture was offset by the appearance of a rotund, unremarkable-looking priest standing on the building’s front porch with his hands in his pockets.

“These people want to see Fr. Corby!” the driver shouted to the priest. Walsh remembered that Fr. William Corby was the provincial, the head of the Holy Cross order at Notre Dame.

“He’s in the presbytery,” said the priest.

As they continued on their way, Walsh’s mother asked the driver about the priest on the porch.

“That’s Fr. Morrissey,” he said, surprised that she didn’t know. “The president.” He stopped the carriage at the door of a small gray building.

It was easy to find Fr. Corby’s office in the deserted building. Through his open door they could see him working at a tiny desk. He looked up as the mother and son he had been expecting appeared in his doorway. With his gray hair and long, flowing beard, Fr. Corby looked every inch the aging Civil War hero. He stood and introduced himself. Both Walshes were trying hard not to show any fear; he was proud of them for that. After a brief conversation about the train ride, he put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. Corby had been a part of many good-byes, in the army and at the seminary. In his experience, it was best to make them quick.

“I’m on my way to see Dr. Linneborn at the seminary,” he said to the slight, quiet boy. “You can go with me.” Walsh, his mother, and Fr. Corby all exchanged looks. It dawned on Walsh’s mother that Corby did not expect her to travel any further with her son. He was in Corby’s hands now.⁹

“Oh,” she said. She took a deep breath. She kneeled and kissed her son on his forehead. “I’ll see you at Christmas.”

Walsh muttered, “Good-bye,” and then she was gone.

“Let’s go,” said Fr. Corby gently, not allowing a pause. He placed his hand on the boy’s shoulder and led him out a different doorway into the blinding summer sunshine.

They walked the short distance to the seminary along a lake. Fr. Corby introduced Walsh to the man at the door.

“This is Dr. Linneborn,” he told him. Walsh could hear the importance that Corby placed on “Dr.” in his introduction. “He is the rector of the seminary.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Walsh.

“I have a job for you already,” said the rector, with a strong German accent. “I need you to bring down all of the mattresses from the attic to air out here on the lawn.” Dr. Linneborn paused, raising a bushy eyebrow at the young seminarian. “I hope you are not too little.”

Over the next two days, Walsh tackled his first project in the seminary, wrestling every mattress outside into the brief South Bend summer air.

Walsh steadily built on the reputation for earnestness and efficiency that he earned in those two summer days. He did what he was told to do and never complained, whether the project was studying the mysteries of the Catholic Church or moving mattresses. As he worked his way through high school and the seminary, that set of attributes gained him the favor of his superiors.

When Walsh completed his high school work in 1899, he began his college studies. The school was rife with conflicts at the time, conflicts that Walsh observed but avoided getting personally involved in. Two camps of priests were at odds, both believing that their goal for the university was most advantageous. One group of priests, led by Fr. John Zahm, argued that Notre Dame needed to do away with its prep school and its trade school and focus on becoming a great university. Zahm’s own academic credentials were impeccable. In addition to having a PhD, he had written a book on evolution—a book eventually banned by the pope for its progressive theories.¹⁰

The other school of thought was led by the university’s president, Fr. Andrew Morrissey, nicknamed “the Kilkenny Chieftain” after the Irish county of his birth. Fr. Morrissey maintained that energy invested in making Notre Dame a great research university was misspent. He believed that their little Catholic school would never be able to compete with the likes of the University of Michigan or Ohio State University. Notre Dame should concentrate on remaining, as he put it, a “compact, tidy little boarding school.”¹¹ The debate turned personal at times. By arguing for faculty with advanced degrees, Fr. Zahm implied that Fr. Morrissey, who did not have a PhD, was not qualified for his position. In fact, no Notre Dame president up to that point had ever held a doctorate.

Matthew Walsh kept his head down and avoided the debate in part because of his natural reticence and in part because he could clearly see both sides. He didn’t go to Notre Dame because it was a great university—he went there because it was a great Catholic university. If improving the academic status of Notre Dame meant watering down its Catholic identity, as many in the Morrissey camp argued, then he wasn’t interested. In addition, if the trade school and the prep school provided the university with a steady stream of much-needed income, then why should the university close them down?

On the other hand, Walsh agreed with the Zahm loyalists that college professors should have PhDs. He could see in his own teachers a subtle but discernible difference between those few with doctorates and those without. It was the difference, he thought, between learning from those who had read the books and those who had written the books. He appreciated Zahm’s argument that the pursuit of knowledge led to a better understanding of God’s creation—and how could that be un-Catholic? Walsh was certain that an advanced education was part of God’s plan for him.

At Notre Dame, seminarians were kept somewhat isolated from the rest of the student body, and Walsh was comfortable with that. He wanted to become a priest—not join the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the 2018 Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: May 19, 1924
• 1 The Antagonists
• 2 Fr. Sorin and the Birth of Notre Dame
• 3 The Reincarnation of the Ku Klux Klan
• 4 Notre Dame and the Indiana Klan
• 5 The Klan Takes Over Indiana
• 6 In the Crosshairs of the Klan
• 7 D. C. Stephenson’s Grab for Power
• 8 The Rally and the Riot
• 9 The Ambush
• 10 The Ascent of Notre Dame
• 11 The Ruin of D. C. Stephenson and the Collapse of the Klan
• 12 The Aftermath
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index