Scarlet Fever, Stanley Matthews, and the Cincinnati Bible War

Abstract

Scarlet Fever, Stanley Matthews, and the Cincinnati Bible War LINDA PRZYBYSZEWSKI In November 1869, two teams oflawyers squared off to argue whether the Cincinnati school board had the power to end a fortyyear -old practice: starting the school day with a reading from the Bible and the singing of hymns. The majority of the school board supported this change. They hoped to attract the children of Catholics by removing from the schools the King James Version of the Bible, a Protestant version. But all hell broke loose as the board members considered their vote. Nasty anti-Catholic editorials came out in the national press, local protest meetings attracted thousands, and leading politicians, merchants, and ministers ofthe city launched a petition drive to keep the Bible in the schools. When the board voted to end the practice despite the protests, a lawsuit was quickly filed. All this came be called the Cincinnati Bible War. And the Ohio Supreme Court decision that allowed the school board to do as it wanted has long been identified as a turning point in the secularization of law.1 During the four days oforal arguments in Cincinnati Superior Court, one man made a point of putting on display both his faith in God and his belief in the Bible as God’s revealed Word. This lawyer ended his argument with a prophecy: if the judges did their duty, this is what would happen: Then shall be hastened the promised time of the coming of our King when there shall be a new heaven and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness—the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of Heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband, the taber­ nacle of God with men, where He will dwell with them and they shall be His people, and God himselfshall be with them and be their God.2 Yes, this lawyer was saying that if the judges did their duty, they would hasten the Second Coming of Christ. If that was not surprising enough, consider which side he was on: This man was not arguing that the school board must continue requiring the reading ofthe Bible in SCARLET FEVER, STANLEY MATTHEWS, AND THE CINCINNATI BIBLE WAR 257 the schools. He was arguing that Bible reading must stop. This argument played a crucial role inwinning the case when it was appealed to the Ohio Supreme Court and the man who made it was Stanley Matthews, the successful Ohio lawyer who led the anti-Bible legal team. Matthews would become a U.S. Senator in 1877 and would sit on the United States Supreme Court from 1881 until his death in 1889, but before then, and before he came to lead the anti-Bible team in Cincinnati, he underwent a remarkable spiritual journey that shaped his legal arguments in court. And the way he argued against the Bible in the schools probably explains why he remained a respect­ able enough man from the religious point of view to make his way to the Senate and the Supreme Court. Siding against the Bible in the wrong way could destroy a political career as Alphonso Taft, the patriarch of the Taft political clan and a judge in the Cincinnati Superior Court, learned to his dismay. Thomas Stanley Matthews (called Stan­ ley) was bom in Kentucky in 1824, two years after Thomas Jefferson predicted that “there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die an Unitarian.”3 Jefferson did not get it quite right with the Matthews family. Matthews’s father, Thomas Johnson Matthews, who became president of Wood­ ward College in Cincinnati in 1832, and then Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, was known to have dismissed the divinity ofJesus as a foolish superstition. Young Matthews followed his father’s lead. One of his daughters described him before his conversion as a “free thinker,” a liberal Unitarian, which would make him a believer in a distant, but benevolent God.4 He regularly attended services at a Universalist Church.5 The younger Matthews was radical enough in outlook to considerjoining at least two utopian communities: North American...