Anti-Catholicism and the Wall

In a lengthy review of the career of Justice Hugo Black, Philip Hamburger ( Separation of Church and State ) lays out his clan connections and the anti-Catholic animus that motivated his views on politics and law.  One supported boasted that Black had visited “Klaverns” all over Alabama during his Senate campaign speaking on Catholicism: “Hugo could make the best anti-Catholic speech you ever heard.”

It’s not an accident that one of Black’s most famous Supreme Court opinions ( Everson v. Board of Education ) insisted that “The first Amendment has erected a wall between church and state.  That wall must be kept high and impregnable.”  According to Hamburger, the decision was part politics and part anti-Catholicism: By denying that busing children to parochial schools was a breach of the wall, Black threw a sop to Catholic critics; by establishing the “wall” principle, he attempted to prevent the government from giving aid to Catholic schools.