Parish Boundaries at 25: A Personal History

Abstract

Parish Boundaries at 25:A Personal History 61 John T. McGreevy As a senior in college without a plan, I pondered attending law school, even taking the LSAT. I simultaneously considered graduate school, despite knowing very little about what graduate school entailed. Most of the graduate schools to which I applied rejected my application—I had only the haziest "research agenda"—but I snuck by the Stanford admissions committee. So to Palo Alto I went. I loved the coursework and even the oral examinations, and enjoyed working with superb faculty such as David Kennedy and George Fredrickson, ultimately the first and second readers on my dissertation. But I agonized over choosing a dissertation topic. Despite completing seminar papers on agrarian populism in 1890s California and on draft resisters during the Vietnam war, I doubted whether I could sustain interest in either topic for the long haul.62 I "stopped out" (to use Stanford vocabulary) for a year and taught at Hales Franciscan high school, an overwhelmingly African-American Catholic High School on Chicago's south side. A graduate school friend, Daryl Scott, now a distinguished historian at Howard University and then working on his history of twentieth century ideas about race and social psychology, turned out to have attended the school. We marveled at this coincidence when we would bump into each other while working in the nearby University of Chicago library. 63 By then I had settled on writing about Catholicism. I did so not because I had read about Catholics in graduate school—I hadn't—but because I knew the depth of the milieu. Both of my parents had attended Catholic grade schools, high schools and colleges. (My father also attended a Catholic medical school.) Both had worked in Catholic hospitals for much of their professional lives. The sheer size of the [End Page 29] subculture made its absence from the standard literature on the United States glaring. Historians of, say, imperial Germany, where Catholics were an equally large part of the population, had done much more to make Catholicism a core topic of inquiry.64 But what would be my angle? No subject seemed more exciting to graduate students doing United States history at Stanford in the 1980s than "race" and George Fredrickson's work, and more distantly that of David Roediger, Barbara Fields and others animated late night conversations.65 J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground, on Boston during the busing crisis, amazed me with its narrative force and recounting of the city's Catholic history. I wrote Lukas out of the blue and he encouraged me to examine his notes deposited at the Wisconsin Historical Society. I remember my excitement when I first plucked Arnold Hirsch's Making the Second Ghetto off a shelf in a Berkeley bookstore.66 Hirsch mentioned Catholics only episodically. But his brilliant research prompted me to ask: what did it mean that Black migrants to the northern cities encountered so many Euro-American Catholics? I tracked Hirsch's footnotes, which led to a full summer going through the Catholic Interracial Council papers at the Chicago Historical Society. So I had a topic. What I didn't anticipate was that interest in religion in modern United States history would explode in the twenty years after turning in my dissertation.67 As it turned out, and as often happens, I was not alone even in my specific interests. Gerald Gamm's Urban Exodus, on Jews and Catholics in Boston, published three years after Parish [End Page 30] Boundaries, even more convincingly displayed the importance of Catholic institutions in shaping American urban life.68 Thomas Sugrue's Origins of the Urban Crisis, published the same year as Parish Boundaries, became the lodestar for our generation's collective understanding of postwar urban history.69 To my mind it still is. Sugrue only touched on Catholicism—as he acknowledges—but almost against his will it popped up in his analysis at various points. He was the first person, I think, to cite my just about to be published dissertation. Sugrue's scholarly example makes me even more grateful for his commentary in this forum. I especially appreciated his discovery of a real estate listing...