Recalling Bloody Monday
Events to mark 1855 anti-immigrant riots in city
By Peter Smith
psmith@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal
Moving through the main streets of town, the Protestant mobs attacked and slaughtered immigrant Catholics -- with ropes, guns, clubs and pitchforks.
At the end of what the Catholic bishop described as a daylong "reign of terror," and what history would call Bloody Monday, at least 22 people were dead. And it happened in Louisville.
"You run into a lot of people who don't even know what Bloody Monday was," said Vicky Ullrich, a Louisville woman whose German-speaking Swiss ancestors fled to Indiana for safety after the events of that day -- Aug. 6, 1855.
Yet, "given what the situation is today, with another influx of immigrants increasing the diversity of Louisville," Ullrich said, it's important that Bloody Monday be remembered "so that a similar event does not happen again."
That's why she's helping to organize a series of commemorations next Saturday to mark the 150th anniversary of Bloody Monday, election-day riots in which Protestant mobs bullied immigrants away from polls and began rioting in Irish and German neighborhoods.
The anniversary events, sponsored by metro government and civic groups, will include a panel discussion and a bus tour of places connected to the riots.
Stories of atrocities from that day in 1855 abounded, such as of an elderly longtime citizen whose murdered body was thrown into the flames of his burning property. The victim's only "crime," lamented the Daily Democrat newspaper, was "that he was an Irishman and a Catholic."
Though Protestants were among the dead, most victims were Catholics targeted by mobs who feared the immigrants' growing numbers.
Irish and German immigrants, most of them Catholic, made up nearly a quarter of Louisville's population of 43,000 at the time, according to the Encyclopedia of Louisville. Most native-born residents were Protestant.
Roy Fuller, who lectures on religion at the University of Louisville, said students today can scarcely believe the stories of Bloody Monday and similar anti-Catholic attacks of that era in other cities.
"We have grown up in an America where Catholics have been very visible and significant in terms of numbers," he said. "It's hard to imagine there would be attacks like this directed against Catholics."
Students also are baffled by the propaganda of the day, which demonized Catholics as members of a sexually perverse, treasonous conspiracy that was secretly trying to turn America over to the pope.
"They're even more surprised that people would believe such things," Fuller said.
Promoting tolerance
Some have said the riots caused many immigrants to flee or avoid Louisville, sapping its economic strength and allowing St. Louis and Cincinnati to eclipse it.
While other historians disagree with that notion, many civic and religious leaders today say that Louisville has since gone out of its way to promote tolerance.
Present-day immigrants find Louisville "very welcoming and open to people from not only Germany and Ireland but also Somalia and Jordan and Mexico and Vietnam," said Omar Ayyash, a native of Jordan and director of the Louisville Metro Office for International and Cultural Affairs. "It's an unfortunate thing that human nature has to go to extreme hatred and bloodshed to learn that a society cannot flourish and grow" that way, he said.
Today, Louisville has three private agencies that bring refugees from troubled lands, and the city has gained national attention for such interfaith endeavors as its annual Festival of Faiths and its network of neighborhood community ministries.
"In contrast to times past, there is such a wonderful ecumenical environment," said the Rev. Bill Hammer, head of the Office of Ecumenical and Interreligious Relations for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Louisville.
While Protestants remain the city's largest religious group, there now are about 157,000 Catholics -- still nearly a quarter of the population.
Semsudin Haseljic, a case manager for Kentucky Refugee Ministries, said city officials and residents have welcomed immigrants and supported them during such recent incidents as when Muslims weathered harassment after the 2001 terrorist attacks.
"Outside of some events after 9/11, it's been a smooth ride," said Haseljic, a Muslim who came to Louisville 11 years ago as a refugee from the religious war in his native Bosnia.
The Rev. Clyde Crews, author of a history of the Archdiocese of Louisville, said that then-Louisville Bishop Martin Spalding and Protestant leaders began establishing this more tolerant environment immediately after Bloody Monday, when they called for calm rather than revenge.
Had the two sides taken a harder line, Louisville could have become "the Belfast of America," said Crews, a Bellarmine University theology professor.
Editor's 'tarnished legacy'
But the ghost of Bloody Monday haunts the legacy of one prominent newspaper editor.
George Prentice, editor of the Louisville Daily Journal newspaper, a predecessor of The Courier-Journal, was widely accused of inflaming the mobs in editorials in the days before the riots. He denounced the "most pestilent influence of the foreign swarms" loyal to a pope he called "an inflated Italian despot who keeps people kissing his toes all day."
Some say Prentice gets too much blame and that city officials created riot conditions with poorly policed, overcrowded voting precincts.
Periodic campaigns to remove Prentice's statue from outside the Louisville Free Public Library downtown -- which honors his other political and literary achievements -- eventually resulted in the placing of a plaque describing his "tarnished legacy."
Prentice's "raw bigotry" is "part of the past that we have to live with, but I don't think that's our legacy," said Courier-Journal Forum editor Keith Runyon, who edited a historical supplement on the newspaper's 125th anniversary in 1993. The newspaper of 1855 "was about as far as you can get from The Courier-Journal of 2005," Runyon said. "Editorially, we always have been concerned in modern times about minority rights, about assimilation, about fair treatment of immigrants."
Bloody Monday has also left a burden for Louisville historians, who continue to wrestle with the sketchy, partisan accounts of it that appeared in the city's newspapers and official records.
"We don't argue about what happened in the earthquakes of 1811-12," said historian and Metro Councilman Tom Owen. "We don't argue about what happened in the 1937 flood or the tornado of 1890. But professionals debate both the causation and the result of Bloody Monday."
Yet the important thing, he said, is not "who fired the first shot."
What is crucial, he said, is to "resolve to never let the fires of passion, of fear or of hatred ever so overwhelm us that something like this would ever happen again."