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Religious Lessons
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Religious Lessons
Catholic Sisters and the Captured
Schools Crisis in New Mexico
K AT H L E E N H O L S C H E R
1
Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further
Oxford University’s objective of excellence
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Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

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Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Holscher, Kathleen A., 1979–
Religious lessons : Catholic sisters and the captured schools crisis in
New Mexico / Kathleen Holscher.
p. cm.
Based on doctoral dissertation “Habits in the classroom: A court case
regarding Catholic sisters in New Mexico”, Princeton (2008).
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-978173-7 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Zellers,
Lydia—Trials, litigation, etc. 2. Huff , Raymond—Trials, litigation, etc.
3. New Mexico. State Board of Education—Trials, litigation, etc.
4. Religion in the public schools—Law and legislation—United States.
5. Church and state—United States. 6. Religion in the public schools—New
Mexico—Dixon—History—20th century. 7. Catholic schools—New
Mexico—Dixon—History—20th century. I. Holscher, Kathleen A., 1979–.
Habits in the classroom. II. Title.
KF228.Z45H65 2012
344.73c07—dc23 2011042915
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For my parents
TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 3
1. Educating in the Vernacular: The Foundations of Sister-Taught

Public Schools 23
2. “We Live in a Valley Cut Off from the Outside World”: Local
Observations on Sisters and the Separation of Church and State 49
3. A Space in Between Walls: Inside the Sister-Taught Public Classrooms

of New Mexico 77
4. Captured!: POAU and the National Campaign against Captive

Schools 106
5. Habits on Defense: The NCWC and the Legal Debate over Sisters’
Clothing 136
6. Sisters and the Trials of Separation 166
Epilogue 189
Notes 201
Bibliography 243
Index 255
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I learned about the Dixon case nearly a decade ago, and I’ve been thinking about
how to tell its story ever since. Doing history is always collaborative, and the account
I offer here is a product of all the people I’ve talked with, shown my work to, and
received support and guidance from along the way. The religion department at Prin-
ceton University was this project’s first home. I am especially grateful for the help of
my advisor there, Leigh Schmidt, who helped me to believe early on that an obscure
court case like Zellers v. Huff could be the subject of more than just a passable dis-
sertation. Leigh has always had the uncanny ability to understand my thought proc-
ess when I research and write. His creativity, enthusiastic and disciplined curiosity,
and respectful attention to the lives of his subjects have all inspired my work. I also
thank Marie Griffith, who read several early versions of this story and who offered
me, the historian, her sage advice as an ethnographer when it came to working with
living sources. In addition, I’m grateful to Albert Raboteau, Eddie Glaude, and
Judith Weisenfeld, all of whom read and commented on early versions of the project.
While still in graduate school, I was fortunate to receive a Mellon /ACLS Disserta-
tion Completion Fellowship, which let me dedicate a full year to writing and allowed
me to spend chunks of time in Santa Fe closer to my source material. I also received
support and stimulating feedback on early chapter drafts during my participation in
the Religion and Culture Workshop at Princeton’s Center for the Study of Religion.
I have gained a great deal in other academic settings as well. A conference on
race and ethnicity in the American West, sponsored by Arizona State University
in 2006, helped me develop my ideas about New Mexico’s Hispano population.
The triennial Conference on the History of Women Religious, at the University
of Notre Dame in 2007, gave me the opportunity to start thinking about the
Catholic sisters at the heart of my project. I am also grateful to the Cushwa
Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame
for inviting me to present my research there in 2008, and especially to Timothy
Matovina, Kathleen Sprows Cummings, and Linda Przybyszewski, who gave me
their feedback on different parts of the book, but especially on the captive
ix
x Acknowledg ments
schools discussion that turned into its fourth chapter. I also had the privilege
along the way of presenting portions of this project at the annual meeting of the
Popular Culture and American Culture Associations, at the American Catholic
Historical Society, and at the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library; as well as to
faculty at the history department of the University of Michigan, the religious
studies department at the University of Texas, and the history department,
religious studies program, and American studies program at the University of
New Mexico. The conversations that happened as part of those experiences made
this project into something richer.
Over the past several years my academic home has been the Department of
Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University. I’ve benefited in all sort
of ways from the support of my department and from the advice of colleagues
there. I’m particularly indebted to Bernard Prusak, Tim Brunk, Bill Werpe-
howski, Rodger Van Allen, and Gustavo Benevides for their input into this book
and their support during the writing process. I’m grateful to Peter Spitaler for
inviting me to present my work during 2010 as part of our department’s graduate
colloquium, and to the graduate students who have given me their feedback, both
directly as part of the colloquium and indirectly during my coursework with
them. Many colleagues outside of my home institution have also supported this
project. I am especially grateful for the generous feedback I’ve received from Tisa
Wenger and Joshua Dubler, and for the formative conversations I’ve had with
Andrea Sun-Mee Jones, Christopher Garces, Lisa Cerami, Laura Bennett,
Heather White, Devon Powers, and Shreena Gandhi. Sarah Barringer Gordon
has played a remarkably important role in my research and writing. I fi rst encoun-
tered the Dixon case while reading Paul Blanshard’s American Freedom and Cath-
olic Power at Sally’s recommendation. She’s been an enthusiastic advocate for this
project from day one, and has demonstrated her generous nature over and over
again. Above all, she’s offered me guidance on how to be a competent religion
scholar in a legal scholar’s world (and I hope I’ve managed to heed it). I was also
the beneficiary of both her professional connections and her personal company
one spring day when we drove south in search of a dusty old fi lm reel.
I’d like to acknowledge Adam Sarapa of Americans United for Separation of
Church and State, who gamely helped us locate that reel; Daniel Linke at Prince-
ton’s Mudd Library, who just as gamely oversaw its conversion onto DVD; and
Amanda Pike and the media services staff at Princeton University, who provided
me with photographic stills from it. I have also been the beneficiary of other dis-
plays of archival generosity. I was received graciously by staff at the archives of the
Archdiocese of Santa Fe, Catholic University of America, the Menaul School,
and—time and time again—the clerk’s office and law library at the Supreme Court
of New Mexico. It’s especially important that I acknowledge the assistance of
Tomas Jaehn at the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library, whom I met by acci-
dent one afternoon in Santa Fe, and who went above and beyond the demands of
Acknowledg ments xi
scholarly courtesy when he offered me his translation of Peter Küppers’

unpublished memoir (written originally in German), as well as personal photo-
graphs of the priest. Tomas is a fi ne historian, and I’m lucky to rely on his work as
source material. I also owe a special measure of thanks to the Dominican sisters of
Grand Rapids, Michigan, who graciously hosted me at their Marywood convent in
2006 and made me feel at home with their stories about New Mexico. Most of all I
am grateful to the community’s archivist, Sister Michael Ellen Carling, who has
continued to show me her generosity, most recently by providing me with photo-
graphs of the women who taught in New Mexico in the 1940s.
I have had dozens of conversations, formal and informal, with people in New
Mexico about their memories of the Zellers case. This book would be impossible
without the generosity of residents of Dixon and Peñasco, New Mexico, many of
whom invited me into their homes and talked with me about their experiences as
children. I am especially grateful to Lucy Rendon of the Dixon/Rio Arriba County
Senior Center, who coordinated my visit there in the summer of 2010; to Viela
Gonzales, who made sure I was always well fed during my days of research; and to
the members of the center, who gave me good company and a lesson or two in com-
petitive bingo. I’m thankful also to the members of the Embudo Presbyterian
Church for inviting me to talk with them. Most of all, I’m grateful for the warm hos-
pitality of Kathy and Tiffin Zellers. Kathy in particular has helped me to accurately
present the hard work of her mother-in-law, Lydia, in this book’s pages.
I reworked several chapters of this book into an article (Kathleen Holscher,
“Contesting the Veil in America: Catholic Habits and the Controversy Over Reli-
gious Clothing in the United States,” Journal of Church and State 54, no. 1 (Winter
2012): 57–81).” In the work of producing the book itself, I’m especially thankful
to my editor Theo Calderara at Oxford University Press. He took an interest in
the project while several different parts of it were still in pieces, and he’s always
been charitable with deadline extensions, and prompt, wise, and good natured in
answering my questions, as I’ve worked to make it whole. More recently, Lisbeth
Redfield and Pamela Hanley have offered me equally sound guidance through
the book’s copy editing and production process.
I owe the most gratitude of all to my family. Fernando Indacochea and Ros-
sana Broggi have opened their home in West Virginia as a haven whenever I’ve
needed a change of scenery to clear my head. My brother Nate has always shared
my interest in both religion and the American Southwest, and he’s given me valu-
able perspective in conversations about locating one’s profession and art in the
channels of one’s life. In recent months, he and Emily Heintzelman have wel-
comed me at their new home in Albuquerque. My parents, Marilyn and Rory
Holscher, have helped me through every stage of this project. My mother flew
down to Santa Fe with me years ago, just because I was curious about the Dixon
case and wanted to fi nd out if the transcript to the Zellers trial still existed (it did).
As I was madly fi nishing revisions on this book, she flew out to Philadelphia to
xii Acknowledg ments
provide emotional support and a week’s worth of home-cooked meals. My father

has offered me his ear and his exceptional insight during long talks and on long
runs. His talents for close reading, and for identifying unexpected qualities in
ordinary things, have shaped my understanding of many parts of this history. I’m
incredibly fortunate to have family who are both my support system and my best
conversation partners. Finally, I’m so grateful to my husband, Alonso Indaco-
chea. Alonso has done a thousand different things over the past decade, in Phila-
delphia and New Mexico, to help this book enter the world. He has watched me
wrestle this story, and stood reassuringly in my corner on days I’d feared I’d lost,
and on days I’d felt I’d won. The promise of a walk with Alonso and our dogs has
always helped me to keep my head up, and fi nd my way through the writing proc-
ess. Th is book wouldn’t exist without him.
Religious Lessons
Introduction
Victoria Johnson sat in a crowded courtroom. It was late September and to allevi-
ate stuffi ness the room’s windows had been thrown open to cooler air and the
smell of the chile harvest roasting across Santa Fe. Inside Victoria was answering
questions put to her by an attorney named Harry Bigbee. As the courtroom’s audi-
ence listened closely Bigbee pressed the young Presbyterian mother to recall
details about her family’s life in the New Mexican village of Dixon. He asked her
to remember the sorts of things her children had learned while attending public
school there. “Did they bring any literature home [from school] with them?” he
wondered at one point.
“Yes, my son did,” Victoria recollected. “He had a sister for a teacher at the time,
and he brought home . . . several different pamphlets, and also a—” here she paused,
fumbling for the correct word—“something they hang around their necks with a
cross around that they have to wear it continually. I had him take it back,” she added.
“Did they recite any prayers they learned in school?” Bigbee asked.
“Yes. . . . The Hail Mary was one I can distinctly remember.”
“Did you ever talk to any of the Sisters about this?”
“Yes,” again was Victoria’s emphatic reply. Her words tumbled now. “My son came
home one evening, and was very upset. Sister Dorothy, I believe it was, had taken
my son by the arm and ushered him into the Catholic Church . . . and told him he
was going to Confession, otherwise he would be punished. He was very upset about
it. So the next morning I made it a point to see Sister Seferina, the principal at that
time, and I spoke to her and she said there would be something done about it. That
was all—that was all she said.”1
Victoria Johnson made these allegations about public education in her home-
town during a nine-day trial in a case called Zellers v. Huff. The Zellers litigation
began in the spring of 1948 when some of Johnson’s neighbors in Dixon filed a com-
plaint with the district court in Santa Fe. Like Johnson, the men and women who
brought the lawsuit worried about the influence of Roman Catholicism on their
children. They hoped they could convince the court to break up an alarming pattern
of cooperation between public educators and the Catholic Church in their state.
Above all they aimed to get rid of dozens of New Mexico’s hybrid “public–parochial”
schools. These schools were funded by tax money but they were administered and
3
4 Religious Lessons
taught by Catholic religious. For decades public–parochial institutions had pro-

vided education to students throughout many of the state’s poorest counties. As a
result, Zellers was a massive piece of litigation. The complaint cited schools in more
than two dozen districts in New Mexico and its list of two hundred and thirty-five
defendants was a Who’s Who of state politicos, from county school board members
all the way up to the governor himself. These public officials were outnumbered in
the complaint, however, by Catholic religious. The Zellers suit implicated two priests
and thirteen religious brothers. It also implicated one hundred and thirty-one Cath-
olic sisters who worked as public teachers in New Mexico.2
While New Mexico was remarkable at mid-century for the extent of Catholic
involvement in its schools, the public–parochial institutions in the state were not
unique. The teachers named in the Zellers lawsuit in 1948 were part of a nationwide
body of Catholic religious professionals participating in American public educa-
tion. While arrangements that put Catholic priests, brothers, and especially sisters
in public classrooms had antecedents stretching back to the nineteenth century,
they were never more common than during the 1940s and 1950s. Between 1945
and 1960 some two thousand Catholic sisters, along with a small handful of clergy
and male religious, were employed as public teachers in the United States.3 Running
classrooms from Kentucky to Colorado, these individuals caught the attention of a
segment of the American public that was deeply troubled by both the legal and
moral implications of an educational system left directly in the hands (so it seemed)
of the Catholic Church. These concerns were expressed by people like Victoria Jack-
son, who lived in the school districts where religious taught, but they were amplified
and organized into a national movement by a Washington-based advocacy group
called Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State
(POAU). Through the late 1940s and 1950s POAU’s leadership set its sights upon
sister-led institutions like the ones in New Mexico. Denouncing them as evidence of
a national crisis of “captive schools,” the organization made it its mission to expose
and fix these collaborative arrangements where it could find them.
The “Dixon case”—as Zellers was popularly named—was the largest of dozens of
litigation efforts that POAU sponsored in its drive to eliminate Catholic women reli-
gious from American public education. The group wasn’t alone in its brand of advo-
cacy work; the middle decades of the twentieth century were filled with all kinds of
activity devoted to church–state questions. Most of this activity was bent on figuring
what support, if any, the government should be giving to religion. At no time since
the nation’s founding was the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause studied so
carefully by the American courts and by the American people. This scrupulous envi-
ronment was inspired and exemplified by a pair of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, in
Everson v. Board of Education in 1947 and McCollum v. Board of Education in 1948.
The Supreme Court stipulated in Everson and then demonstrated in McCollum that
the Establishment Clause required no less than a “wall of separation” to keep apart
church and state. By incorporating Thomas Jefferson’s architectural metaphor into
Introduc tion 5
First Amendment jurisprudence, the Court’s decisions inaugurated a generation of

earnest if sometimes fixated legal conversations about the place of religion in Amer-
ican public life. More than a half-century later, the controversies it considered in
Everson and McCollum—over the use of public funds for busing parochial students
and over the release of students from public classrooms so they might receive reli-
gious instruction in their schools—are the episodes that define that era’s stormy
church–state contests. In contrast, POAU’s captive schools and the women who
taught in them have fallen by the historical wayside—this in spite of the fact litiga-
tion that challenged sister-taught schooling was more common than either busing or
released time lawsuits during the 1940s and 1950s.4
Sister-taught schooling cases are unfamiliar because they never left the state
courts. In New Mexico, the Zellers lawsuit had consequences. After listening to the
evidence presented by Victoria Jackson and other witnesses, the judge presiding at
trial concluded that any “reasonable person” who visited schools named in the com-
plaint would concede that church–state separation in New Mexico was “a mirage.”5
As a result he barred most of the implicated religious from future employment in
the state. Reviewing the case two years later, New Mexico’s supreme court issued a
broader indictment of sister-led public education. “In short,” the court wrote, “New
Mexico has a Roman Catholic school system supported by public funds within its
public school system.”6 The high court used Zellers as an opportunity to comment
on the legality of all Catholic religious who worked as public employees. No matter
how carefully a sister conducted her classroom, its panel of justices concluded, her
very appearance—the visual impression that she made—was a breach of the state
and federal constitutions. Citing Catholic influence embedded in the distinctive
cloth habits sisters wore, the court banned any teacher dressed in “religious garb”
from work in the state’s schools.7 Despite this provocative assertion about what
church–state separation demanded, however, Zellers v. Huff never left New Mexico’s
courts, and so its anti-garb pronouncement was never binding beyond the state.
Courts who heard captive school suits in other states during the same period handed
down decisions that like Zellers weighed the constitutionality of teaching sisters’
costumes. But those cases never reached the U.S. Supreme Court either. The captive
school era came and went without a federal court commenting on the presence of
sisters or their clothing in public classrooms. The frequency of these lawsuits during
the 1940s and 1950s, coupled with their absence from federal case law, prompted
one prominent political scholar to describe sister-taught public schools as the
“major ‘nonissue’ in the constitutional law of church-state relations.”8
This book is the story of the best-known fight over Catholic sisters teaching
publicly. Even though Zellers v. Huff was a constitutional “nonissue,” its litigation
and the hubbub that attended it said every bit as much about the church–state rela-
tionship within the lives and imaginations of Americans as did precedent-setting
cases of the period. The details of the Dixon case were familiar to hundreds of
thousands of people who read about them in magazines and newspapers and heard
6 Religious Lessons
them discussed in church on Sunday mornings. The startling and vivid scenario of
Catholic nuns in habits teaching children like Victoria Johnson’s son provoked a
feeling of urgency in its audience that bus transportation and released time dis-
putes could not.9 The Dixon case caught the attention of both Catholics and non-
Catholics, and it drew reactions from experts in constitutional law as well as citizens
who otherwise had little interest in constitutional debates. For many Americans at
mid-century, New Mexico’s schools and the women who taught in them—rather
than the dry discourse of the Supreme Court—embodied the high stakes of
church–state conflicts. Because the litigation touched so many people, inside and
outside of New Mexico, and because it touched a nerve with many whom it
involved, the Dixon case is an opportunity for surveying the dispositions and pre-
dilections—often formed by religious experience—that motivated public partici-
pation in mid-century church–state disputes. The following chapters recount
conversations and activities that oriented Americans in their thinking about the
relationship of the Catholic Church to children’s schooling, and that intersected
during the Zellers lawsuit in 1948. Taken together these accounts demonstrate the
energy that people of different backgrounds, from Washington attorneys to Catho-
lic sisters to Spanish-speaking residents in New Mexico, exerted to work out the
proper role of the church vis-à-vis the state. They also disclose what Clifford Geertz
called the forms of “local knowledge,” many of them rooted in religion, which
informed these men, women, and children in their legal work.10
Two arguments frame the book. First, sister-taught schooling disputes like New
Mexico’s represent a transitional moment in the Protestant–Catholic conflicts that
make up so much of American church–state history. For this reason, they compli-
cate the oppositional framework that religious and legal historians tend to use when
they describe those conflicts. The Dixon case did pit Catholics against Protestants—
diametrically so. The Protestant and Catholic advocacy groups who battled one
another in Zellers and similar episodes, however, also had something important in
common. Advocates on either side insisted on evaluating the rightness or wrong-
ness of sister-taught schools using religious dictates as their points of reference.
Their shared adamancy that these religious viewpoints had a place within judicial
contests over the Establishment Clause was noteworthy at a moment when many in
the American legal community—including its high court—appeared, to the chagrin
of devout Protestants as well as Catholics, to be moving toward the conclusion that
secularism was the only constitutional future for public education in the United
States.11 In this sense, captive school conflicts happened along multiple fronts at
once. They pitted Protestants against Catholics, but they also saw Protestants and
Catholics similarly pitted against—and articulating legal ideas in opposition to—
the specter of a non-religious public sphere. Although this similarity went unrecog-
nized at the time, it presaged the open alliance between conservative Protestants
and Catholics that would rock the nation’s political landscape during the “culture
wars” of the second half of the twentieth century.12
Introduc tion 7
My second argument is methodological. Disputes like the one I describe here are
inscrutable from a historical perspective that limits itself to the ideas of legal experts.
To make sense of sister-taught schools requires a sufficiently catholic model of legal
discourse—of the types of people who participate in it and the sorts of motivations
that drive it. Likewise it requires a movement beyond ideas themselves as a starting
place for studying the separation of church and state. The Dixon case enacted the
Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Establishment Clause upon tens of thou-
sands of Americans. Unlike advocacy groups who argued systematically about sepa-
ration’s meaning at mid-century, many of these people didn’t hold fixed convictions
about the correct position of the church when it came to functions of the state. They
did, however, hold a stake in the debates happening around them. For Catholics
especially, the church–state relationship was often embedded within, and enacted
through, activities and experiences—everything from the lessons they learned as
children to the friendships and occupations they pursued as adults. Though these
Americans never thought much about separation in principle, the things they did in
their lives made them interested parties in its negotiation. Developing an account of
mid-century church–state litigation that is inclusive enough to consider the popula-
tion it affected requires us to look past forms of legal knowledge that privilege belief
to also consider the practices—the habits—that made the church–state relation-
ship real and relevant for many people. This movement from belief to practice is
already familiar territory in the study of religion; here it’s relevant to the study of law
as well. The thousands of people who, in one way or another, became involved in
litigation in New Mexico in 1948 were just a fraction of the millions of Americans
for whom the law was less about judicial doctrine than it was about social practice.
The story of the Dixon case begins in New Mexico. The desert in the north-central
part of that state is broken by high, rugged terrain. Two ranges—the western Jemez
Mountains and the taller Sangre de Cristos to the east—mottle the landscape into
ridges that parallel one another and then turn to converge as they wear down near
Santa Fe. Between them is a swath of lowland in the rough shape of an arrow and
narrowest at its southern end. This area, a part of the Upper Rio Grande Basin, is a
unique topographic district, and through the twentieth century scholars of the
region claimed it as a distinct ethno-cultural district as well.13 As the Rio Grande
runs south through the Basin’s main valley it’s joined by spring and mountain run-
off-fed tributaries. This water has nourished the succession of peoples who have
called the Basin home. Ancestors of the Pueblo Indians settled in the Rio Grande
valley some two millennia ago; today their descendents live in the linguistically
heterogeneous pueblos that extend to the north and west of Albuquerque and
Santa Fe. The Spaniards and criollos who began arriving in the region in the six-
teenth century established their own institutions along the river, and their
descendents still occupy land granted to their families by the governments of
Spain and later Mexico.14 Around the turn of the twentieth century, a small but
8 Religious Lessons
visible population of Anglos—missionaries, artists, and fortune hunters—took up

residence in the Basin as well.
The most visible Anglos in the Basin during the first half of the twentieth cen-
tury were Catholic sisters. Unmistakable even at a distance in their voluminous
black, brown, or white habits, the women religious were everyday sights in north-
ern New Mexico. Their veiled faces were especially familiar to children. Nuns
taught publicly in twenty-six different New Mexican communities in the 1940s.15
They worked as far away as Tucumcari to the east and Carrizozo to the distant
south, but in the northern part of the state they were a critical mass. In the 1940s
at least sixteen villages scattered across the Basin and its surrounding mountains
had public schools run by sisters. Eight of these communities were contained
within just two counties—Rio Arriba and Taos. In the village of Chama in Rio
Arriba County, Franciscan sisters arrived from St. Louis in 1942 to teach in the
local school. In Parkview (now Los Ojos) and Tierra Amarilla, a group of Indiana
Franciscans had been employed since 1918 and 1923 respectively.16 In the vil-
lages of San Juan, Abiqui, Peñasco, and Ranchos de Taos, Dominican sisters orig-
inally from Grand Rapids, Michigan, had a reputation for outstanding public
teaching. And in Dixon, which was nestled on a river junction at the Basin’s heart,
a third community of Franciscans was the most recent cadre of teaching religious
to set up shop in the region.
Like other people who lived in the rural villages of northern New Mexico,
most of Dixon’s residents spoke Spanish as their first language. When it came to
religion, however, similarities between Dixon and Catholic enclaves elsewhere in
the Basin ended. Only half of Dixon’s residents identified as Catholic, while the
other half were Protestants—the legacy of turn-of-the-century Presbyterian mis-
sions in the region. Competition between Catholics and Protestants surfaced all
the time in Dixon, especially when its residents broached the topic of schools. In
1941 an intractable priest named of Peter Küppers persuaded the Rio Arriba
County school board to close Dixon’s public school and send its students to a
nearby parochial one. The county agreed to recognize St. Joseph’s Catholic school
as Dixon’s new—and only—public institution, and it began to pay the Francis-
cans who were already teaching in it for their services. Protestant parents were
furious at the arrangement and before long several of the village’s prominent resi-
dents, led by a young mother named Lydia Cordova Zellers, organized as the
Dixon Free Schools Committee. In the spring of 1948 the committee formalized
its grievances with Küppers and the county board with the complaint it filed in
Santa Fe.
While the Franciscans’ work with Protestant youth in Dixon was the immediate
reason for the Free School Committee’s action, its lawsuit made bigger allegations
about church–state collusion. Its statewide scope and its long list of defendants
were possible because of support that came to the committee from outside New
Mexico. In the wake of the Everson decision, national organizations that promoted
Introduc tion 9
Colorado
Peñasco
Dixon
Santa Fe
de
ran
oG
Ri
Albuquerque
W E
N e w M e x i co
S
Location of public-parochial school
0 100 miles
Rio
0 100 km
G
ran
de
Texas
MEXICO
Figure I.1 Religious-taught public schools in New Mexico c. 1948.
church–state separation were looking for opportunities to clear the residue of sec-
tarian influence from public education. POAU was the newest player in this game
and its work had a singular target. Its leadership—a coalition of nationally recog-
nized Protestant ministers—vowed to defend against “a powerful church . . . com-
mitted in authoritative declarations and by positive acts to a policy plainly subversive
of religious liberty as guaranteed by the Constitution.”17 Within weeks of its found-
ing, the organization made the Dixon lawsuit its flagship project and a cause célèbre.
POAU sent lawyers to New Mexico and promoted the controversy there to an enor-
mous network of supporters across the country. In books and magazine articles,
10 Religious Lessons
mass mailings, and later a film, POAU situated New Mexico’s schools within a cen-
turies-old Protestant discourse of Catholic captivity. It stressed the importance of
separation by detailing the indignities New Mexican students suffered at the hands
of a predatory Church. It called men and women across the nation to vigilance by
offering Dixon as grim evidence that their own institutions were on the verge of
capture and their own children just a teacher-hire away from similar fates.
POAU’s work in New Mexico and the nationwide captive school campaign that
ensued put the organization at the forefront of separation advocacy during a time
when the principle was in the throes of change. When the Supreme Court incorpo-
rated the model of a separating wall into constitutional law in Everson and McCollum,
it made church–state separation an indisputable standard within American educa-
tion. Advocates at POAU and elsewhere took advantage of the muscle the Court’s
decisions threw behind their cause. As they did so, however, they disagreed about
the implications of the principle they were fighting for. Separation was imagined by
Americans who supported it at mid-century in a variety of ways. The value of reli-
gious freedom, and the belief that church and government need to remain apart to
preserve this freedom, are older than the United States. Their practical conse-
quences—or what sort of arrangement a person is asking for when he or she appeals
for the exclusion of church from state—have changed over time. Philip Hamburger
has argued that, early on, the value of church–state separation was not linked to the
First Amendment; rather, it gained its American following in the mid-nineteenth
century as a reaction to the prospect of Catholic influence within politics and educa-
tion. In the face of Irish immigration, and concern that the Catholicism immigrants
brought with them might destroy both the nation’s individual freedoms and its Prot-
estant ethos, Americans began conflating the disestablishment and free exercise
guarantees of the First Amendment with the removal of undesirable religious influ-
ences from the public sphere. “Fears of church authority and especially of the Catho-
lic Church,” Hamburger writes, “made separation respectable as an ‘American’
principle.”18 Into the twentieth century most Americans understood church–state
separation not as the erasure of God from public institutions, but as a defense against
forms of religion that could pervert the Christian morals those institutions were
expected to promote. In these imaginings, mainstream Protestantism remained
exempt from scrutiny. Religion, insofar as it was a problem, translated to sectarian-
ism. In most places sectarianism was code for Catholicism.
Though still popular in the 1940s and 1950s, this Protestant reading of sepa-
ration was being challenged in a way it hadn’t been before. Over the first decades
of the century, more and more American liberals—Protestants, Jews, and non-
religious citizens—had begun to argue that church–state separation demanded
not only nonsectarian but non-religious public spaces. Although these liberal
separationists remained a minority, Everson and especially McCollum buoyed
their cause. When the Court made separation a guiding value in First Amend-
ment jurisprudence, it introduced a robust constitutional standard, one this group
Introduc tion 11
rightly anticipated might extend to all organized religious activity in public

classrooms. In the first decade after Everson and McCollum, prayer and Bible
reading remained a part of state-sponsored education. By the early 1960s, how-
ever, the Court would revisit its decisions, and use them as precedent to remove
the vestiges of Christian worship from the nation’s schools.19 In the interim
between Everson and the Supreme Court’s rulings on prayer and Bible reading,
liberal and conservative separationists went back and forth about the implica-
tions of the Court’s wall. The former insisted it required an across-the-board
exclusion of religion from public classrooms. The latter hung onto a Protestant-
friendly view of separation; these advocates denounced calls for anything
stronger as promoting what they described as anti-religious secularism. Both
groups held out hope they could define the limits of the new wall accordingly.
While several of POAU’s founders fell into the liberal separationist camp, much
of its early membership remained committed to a Protestant-centric reading of the
principle. Disputes like Dixon helped its leadership find the common ground
between these views. Extending his thesis to the twentieth century, Hamburger
situates the separation impulses that drove the Everson era as late examples in the
long and vaguely nativistic push against Catholicism.20 The rhetoric POAU used
during captive school episodes seems to support this claim. Despite conflicting
ideas among its members, POAU presented a unified front against sister-taught
public schools. The captivity stories its supporters told about these institutions
placed the organization and its work in a well-known tradition of Protestant objec-
tions to the Catholic Church. At the same time, POAU’s captive schools crusade
was more than the last hurrah in a long Protestant campaign against Catholicism in
the American public sphere. It was also an indicator that many Catholics and Prot-
estants were beginning to share interests within the negotiation of church and state.
POAU found its main opponent in an organization called the National Catholic
Welfare Conference (NCWC). Even as POAU battled the NCWC over New Mexi-
can schools, the groups had things in common in how they fought. Captive schools
conflicts became occasions for both POAU and the NCWC to employ, and publicly
promote, traditionally religious modes of evaluating church–state relations in a
period marked by formidable secular alternatives. Sister-taught institutions made
powerful impressions—as right or wrong, wholesome or corrupt—on the men and
women who encountered them. Those impressions had roots in a person’s underly-
ing sensibilities about things like the purpose of schooling and the function of the
state. For a range of Americans at mid-century, those sensibilities were still culti-
vated by and within the religious traditions to which they belonged. When POAU
and the NCWC made their arguments for and against publicly teaching sisters in
1948, they tested the legal relevance of such sensibilities against one another and
against the Supreme Court’s recent reading of the Establishment Clause.
For the mixed membership of POAU, sister-taught institutions offered a naviga-
ble bridge between a Protestant past and a more secular future. The organization
promoted the Dixon case so enthusiastically because its details spoke to the multi-
ple constituencies within POAU’s own ranks—to religiously oriented separation-
ists, to secularly oriented separationists, and to those who hesitated somewhere in
between. Its litigation held the differences between these impulses at bay and
offered the Protestant-minded advocates who formed the organization’s base a last-
minute opportunity to shape the public conversation about church and state in the
years after Everson and McCollum. By promoting captive schools, POAU kept both
the public’s and the judiciary’s attention trained on Catholic assaults upon the sepa-
ration principle. Paradoxically, the Protestant worldview embedded in the publicity
that surrounded these schools helped to prevent—or at least delay—scrutiny of the
lingering Protestantism within American education. The dilatory effect of captive
schools was neither tactical nor even fully recognized by POAU’s own membership.
In distracting its audiences from questions about Protestantism within American
public life, the organization did an even better job of distracting itself. Serious con-
cerns about Catholic power motivated POAU’s campaign. It just so happened that
those concerns displaced its members’ occasional uneasiness about the principle
they were fighting for.
On the Catholic side Zellers was an occasion for equally earnest reflection on the
mutual relationship of church and state. Responsibility for managing the sisters’
defense in New Mexico fell to the Washington-based NCWC. The NCWC was at
mid-century the institutional clearinghouse for social policy and engagement within
the American Church, and its legal department had the hefty job of advising dio-
ceses across the country troubled by church–state matters. Its attorneys poured
their energy into developing a Catholic position in the Establishment Clause
debates. Unlike their counterparts at POAU, these NCWC personnel were explicit
that their fight to preserve Catholic participation within public education was part
and parcel of a struggle against secularism. In their efforts to defend sister-taught
schools they asserted readings of the First Amendment that, had they managed to
sway the nation’s judiciary, would have preserved a place not only for Catholicism
but for religion generally within public classrooms. While the religious rhetoric
POAU employed during captive school conflicts helped it to avoid directly engaging a
secular separation model, the legal minds at the NCWC hoped they could apply a
Catholic framework as a means to engage that same model. Insofar as its attorneys
represented the Church’s official interests, however, their bid at crafting a position
on the First Amendment was handicapped from the start. For the Catholic hierar-
chy the religion clauses of the U.S. Constitution represented both a logistical and a
theological headache. Between 1940 and 1960 the Catholic population in the
United States doubled.21 Baby boom children represented most of this growth, and
they placed unprecedented demand on Catholic schools as they grew up. Given the
circumstances, Catholic leaders all over the country, from local school officials to
powerful cardinals, were agitating for funding and other forms of public support
to bolster Catholic education. The Church tolerated collaborative arrangements
Introduc tion 13
even when they were legally problematic; unlike the American government, the
Catholic Church at mid-century didn’t recognize any inherent value in either reli-
gious liberty or church–state separation. The absence of these principles from Cath-
olic doctrine stymied the NCWC’s legal department as it tried to defend teaching
sisters. Its attorneys found it impossible to develop a position within the era’s First
Amendment debates that was both constitutionally compelling and consistently
Catholic.
Despite the best efforts of the NCWC and POAU to frame sister-taught school-
ing conflicts using religious points of reference, in the end their participation in
Zellers and the suits that followed helped make a secular model of separation real-
ity for both organizations. For the NCWC, the insufficiency of Catholic asser-
tions about church and state within the American judiciary was evident when it
failed to exculpate its clients in Zellers. The organization acknowledged as much
by coaching American sisters who were teaching elsewhere to withdraw from
public employment—even in states where their legal status was still an open ques-
tion. For POAU, capitulation to a secular model of church and state happened a
decade later, when the arguments for separation it had helped to promote in its
fight against captive schools appeared in litigation that sought to abolish prayer
and Bible reading from public education. True to its separationist mission, the
organization eventually threw its support behind the suits that took aim at
Christian practices. As historian Sarah Barringer Gordon recently put it:
POAU said again and again [that church–state separation] meant that
religious influences within public schools violated the establishment
clause. Their own work contributed to the erosion of legal standards that
had silently yet effectively screened the kind of religious education that
most POAU members thought should be supported by public funds.22
In this way, captive schooling disputes signaled a gradual transition for advocacy
organizations on both sides of the issue toward recognition—in practice if not
always in principle—of a constitutional model of separation that mandated non-
religious public classrooms.
Interest in Zellers extended beyond advocacy groups. With its massive scope, and
following as closely as it did after Everson and McCollum, the case introduced the
Supreme Court’s language of a separating wall to thousands of Americans. It
required Catholics in some parts of the country to assess for the first time the
function and value of separation in their lives. Through the first half of the twenti-
eth century, the American public regarded the principle with a mixture of enthu-
siasm, skepticism, and indifference. For a generation of Protestants, separating
church from state was an imperative that had never been dearer; never more a part
of the nation’s moral fabric, never more realizable, and never more threatened. As
Hamburger describes this period: “an ever wider range of Americans both agi-
tated for separation and self-consciously attempted to live in accord with this prin-
ciple. As a result, growing numbers . . . became aware of the tensions raised by
separation and thought about them in detailed, concrete ways.”23 Most Catholics
in the United States had a different experience. For many of them the impulse to
keep church and state apart was unpalatable. For some it was flat-out incompre-
hensible. For every American during the first part of the century who offered up
detailed and concrete reflections on the principle—on its significance to the
nation and what behaviors it should (and should not) govern—there were others
for whom church–state separation had little or no intrinsic value. These men and
women, if they thought about it at all, disregarded it as a remote concept with only
marginal relevance to their daily lives.
For many Catholics, separation became relevant only after the Everson and
McCollum decisions. Everson did more than create a constitutional mandate for
separation; it also stipulated for the first time that the Establishment Clause
applied to state education laws.24 Although most states already had language pro-
hibiting sectarianism in their constitutions and school codes, with Everson they
became subject both to the First Amendment’s religion clauses and to the high
court’s standard for what those clauses demanded. This development forced lots
of Catholic communities to face the prospect of introducing separation into their
schools. While most Catholic families in the United States had been required to
choose between parochial and public education for decades, tens of thousands of
parents and students who relied on Catholic religious in their public schools did
not.25 By pressing states on their obligation to uphold the Supreme Court’s wall
in the years after Everson, captive schooling lawsuits brought separation to these
Catholics across the country and made them aware of its weight and conse-
quences. The Dixon case effected church–state separation in the lives of more of
them than any other. For its New Mexican participants, Zellers didn’t start as a
symposium on a legal principle. It was first and foremost a troubling episode in
the local culture—a commentary on religious differences that had fractured his-
torically Catholic villages since the arrival of Protestant missions in the nine-
teenth century, on ethnically rooted disagreements that destabilized the state’s
civic and ecclesiastic institutions, and on the poverty of Spanish-speaking resi-
dents and their reactions to it in the absence of innate loyalty to either American
common schooling models or constitutional law. For New Mexico’s sisters the
lawsuit was also a commentary on the challenges of behaving in ways that satis-
fied both the demands of their religious vows and the expectations of their
employers. In New Mexico—which had become a state only in 1912—debates
over separation were spread across the front pages of newspapers. They were
argued hotly by all sides. But the people who lived there got invested in those
debates for fundamentally different reasons than the advocacy groups who inter-
vened in Zellers.
Introduc tion 15
During the first half of the twentieth century, people who lived as Spanish
Americans and people who lived as Native Americans usually had different school-
ing experiences. In New Mexico as elsewhere, American Indian education was gov-
erned by the federal rather than the state government. For this reason, Native
American children rarely attended New Mexico’s sister-taught public schools.26
Nearly all the New Mexicans who had a personal stake in the contested schools
were Spanish American. Most Hispanos supported the presence of women reli-
gious in their local institutions.27 From the nineteenth century through the 1940s,
these native-born residents demonstrated general disregard for the principle of
church–state separation whenever it showed up in the laws of their territory and
later their state. This disregard didn’t mean New Mexico’s inhabitants were cavalier
when it came to education—especially in rural areas, parents sometimes went to
extraordinary lengths to make sure their sons and daughters attended school. Nor
did it imply a simple allegiance between Hispano New Mexicans and the Catholic
Church. Though religious loyalties were important in the Rio Grande Basin, the
interests of the mainly Catholic people who lived there were a world away from
those of the Church’s hierarchy and the NCWC’s attorneys. New Mexico’s Hispano
population had a history of butting heads with the Archbishop of Santa Fe over
schooling. For adults and especially for children, Catholic sisters inhabited a com-
plicated psychological space, which in turn guided local opinion on their place in
the schools. The women inspired a respect among their pupils that was heartfelt
and that also carried with it unpleasant feelings like confusion, fear, or shame. Even
in the context of these charged relationships, however, most parents and students
approved of their teachers. Collective skepticism about Anglo biases in the state’s
public system paired with the predominant faith to make sister-taught classrooms
desirable arrangements in more than two dozen Hispano communities. The obvi-
ous exception was Dixon, where in the 1940s a group of Spanish-speaking Protes-
tants tapped a different sort ethnic–religious alliance to develop arguments in favor
of separation, and to agitate for the expulsion of sisters from their schools.
The Catholic women religious who worked in New Mexico also negotiated sepa-
ration differently than the Church personnel advocating on their behalf. For sisters,
public teaching was a necessary part of educating Catholics in the postwar era, even
as the rules of Catholic religious life during those years made public work difficult.
As the postwar baby boom stretched the capacity of Catholic schools, it created
unprecedented demand for religious to teach in them. This demand extended to
parochial and public institutions alike, and it was answered by a generation of ener-
getic female vocations. Never before (or since) were women religious so ubiquitous
in the lives of Catholic children or such widely recognized symbols of Catholic life
in the United States generally.28 Their flourishing as educators, however, happened
within the deeply conservative climate that characterized institutional Catholicism
during the first half of the twentieth century. In 1917, the Vatican issued a Code of
Canon Law that placed tight restrictions upon women’s religious communities. The
Code included new rules governing sisters’ dress and their behavior outside convent
walls, and it secured the authority of American bishops to regulate the activities of
women religious in their dioceses. Relatively high levels of public activity and com-
munity self-determination that had existed among Catholic sisters in the nineteenth
century were checked with the 1917 Code and didn’t reappear until the Sister For-
mation movement of the 1950s and Vatican II.29
The religious who taught publicly at mid-century did so in the shadow of the
1917 Code. As a result, they were subject to all types of rules intended to limit
their interactions with the non-religious sphere. In New Mexico sisters experi-
enced firsthand the difficulties that could arise when these rules clashed with the
requirements of state employment. While sisters found joy in their work, they also
took to heart, and often shared, the conservative views of their superiors. As they
taught, the women struggled to reconcile the public character of what they were
doing with their ideas of an appropriately pious life. The hybrid schooling arrange-
ments that infuriated the Dixon committee and POAU were their attempts to
solve this puzzle. Although the sisters who taught publicly in New Mexico in the
1940s were reticent to discuss church–state separation with anyone, their work
spoke volumes about their stake in the debate. In their classrooms, women reli-
gious acted out a perspective on church and state relations built from religious
commitments as well as from civil expectations. During the school day, as they
organized lesson plans and designed visual aids, these sisters made hundreds of
decisions about the parts Catholic teaching and government curricula should
each play in their students’ learning. These piecemeal, pedagogic assertions paral-
leled the macrocosmic deliberations ongoing over the proper relationship between
religious and civil influences in children’s education.
During the Zellers litigation, people who otherwise would never have spent
time together met one another and exchanged information. Protestant members
of the Dixon Free Schools Committee walked into Catholic sisters’ classrooms and
watched them work. Nationally prominent figures—people like Frank Mead,
former editor-in-chief of the Christian Herald magazine, and Charles Fahy, the
former U.S. Solicitor General—traveled to New Mexico and talked with people
living there. Texts from the U.S. Supreme Court circulated among clergy in the
Archdiocese of Santa Fe, and information traveled the other direction as well, as
sisters’ accounts of their work in New Mexico gathered on the desks of attorneys in
Washington. With all this traffic of people and ideas, the Dixon case is poised at
the intersection of cultural and legal history. It’s tempting to think about sisters’
classrooms as the stuff of lived religion—the province of women and children, the
ordinary or the everyday—while relegating the courtroom to the pages of intel-
lectual history, as a space for men, public debate, and the creation of governing
ideas. To talk about classrooms and courtrooms separately, however, is to conceal
similarities between both venues as well as the influence the activities of each have
brought to bear on the other. The bustling back-and-forth activity of the Dixon
Introduc tion 17
case demonstrates how misleading the distinction between “lived” history and
“intellectual” history can be.30 Among other things, this book is an attempt to
recover the potency of a lived approach to studying religious history. It doesn’t
privilege popular forms of religiosity to the exclusion of governing discourses;
rather, it explores the long and eventful border region between the two. Lived reli-
gion happens all over the place, but it’s easiest to provide a full accounting of it in
settings that connect individuals in immediate, and more-or-less transparent, ways
to the structures that govern them. Classrooms and courtrooms are two such set-
tings. Because it took place in these sorts of spaces, the Dixon case is a study of the
interplay between ordinary people and activities on the one hand, and legal dis-
course and other formal modes for talking about religion on the other.
Everyone who gathered in the Zellers courtroom, whether they were Catholic
sisters, New Mexican residents, or Washington legal experts, weighed in—in some
shape or form—on the prospect of separation in children’s schools. When it came
to how church and state were imagined by people in New Mexico, sisters’ lessons
and the impressions they left on children and parents were every bit as important as
the legal arguments POAU and the NCWC brought with them to Santa Fe. Along-
side formal debates over separation, those religious lessons steered the course of
litigation. Legal discourse made up only the articulated tip of American sensibilities
about the part religion should play in education. For most people, presumptions
about the correct relationship between one’s church and one’s child’s school were
more informed by routine behaviors peculiar to the place one lived in, the job one
did, and the people one lived among. Together these activities might enact the
importance of strong separation between church and state or—as was the case
among so many Catholics—they might suggest a different view.31 This practical
experience of church and state was especially true for individuals untrained in the
law, like many residents in northern New Mexico. It was also true for people brought
into litigation through no choice of their own, like the Catholic sisters who taught
there.
While this story is about a constitutional principle, it is also about Americans
who felt that principle’s consequences. For this reason I consider lesson plans along-
side judicial opinion, customs along with disquisitions, to account for how people
implicated in church–state litigation naturalized, transformed, or repudiated sepa-
ration as a value in their lives. Just as religion scholars reared by a post-Protestant
academy still privilege belief over practice when they talk about how their subjects
“do” religion, so scholars of the First Amendment also privilege belief when they
talk about how their subjects negotiate its religion clauses.32 The religious lives of
people aren’t always oriented around fixed convictions, however, and the civic lives
of people don’t necessarily include fixed convictions about the laws they have a duty
to obey. This story is about the meanings people assigned to the principle of church–
state separation at mid-century, but it is also about the practices that informed and
sometimes destabilized those meanings. These activities were the stuff of day-to-day
life, from exchanges between Spanish-speaking residents and English-speaking offi-

cials, to Sunday sermons exclaiming the benefits of American-style education, to
the small victories and defeats that made up a child’s school year. While most of
these behaviors were never intended to shape the law, taken together they explain
the investment of people in the legal processes that grew to include them. This was
true for Catholics who supported sister-taught schools and for Protestants who
objected to Catholic sisters teaching their children. It was especially true for sisters
themselves. The women who ended up as defendants in the Dixon case didn’t disre-
gard the impetus to keep church and state separate, but whatever significance they
gave the principle stayed implicit in their teaching. When those sisters did eventu-
ally stop to reflect, it was only in self-defense and under duress. During the trial,
their efforts to translate the practices of their classrooms into the constitutional dis-
course privileged by the court were a resounding failure—one welcomed by the
Free Schools Committee and its attorneys.
Of course the conflict at the heart of Zellers was not over an activity but an
object. For sisters teaching publicly across the United States, the heavy folds of their
costumes decided their professional fates. For students who studied with sisters,
the Catholic habit was a powerful visual cue, a loaded symbol that (for better or
worse) dominated impressions they formed of their teachers. A woman who
attended public school in New Mexico in the 1940s acknowledged as much when
she described to me how she felt after the sisters left her village. “I missed the habit,”
she emphasized. “It wasn’t around anymore, and it meant something. It meant
Catholic, it meant faith.”33 For adults who fought over it, the habit’s visibility ren-
dered it dangerous or valuable in equal parts. Everyone knew that its ability to catch
even the smallest child’s eye made the costume a high-stakes test of how far the wall
of separation should extend. For the women who actually wore it, the habit was a
material marker of their own wall of separation from the non-Catholic world. Even
as courts and legislatures across the country were deciding that religious needed to
remove their Catholic garb to teach, sisters who were instructed to alter their cloth-
ing balked or were prohibited in doing so by their superiors. In New Mexico and
elsewhere, a few pieces of woolen cloth came to stand between two ultimately
incompatible visions of education. Their coarse materiality embodied the mutual
limitation of each.
Today, Catholic habits are unusual sights in the United States. Disputes over
religious garb have continued, however, and laws designed to prohibit the Catholic
sister’s tunic and veil now apply to teachers wearing other styles of dress. In the
twenty-first century, clothing remains one of the most recognizable and most
contested markers of religious commitment within civil society. Debates over
the Islamic veil in Europe and to a lesser extent the United States carry echoes of
the captive school era. Like their mid-century predecessors, these episodes are
marked by the particular fury that is sparked when clothing—a medium of
expression so intimate that it is adjacent to the human body itself—is isolated,
Introduc tion 19
reflected upon, and found to be either unduly aggressive or unduly threatened. No

one notices sisters’ absence from these latest debates. Grounded as they are in the
preoccupations of our post-9/11 era, clothing conflicts today offer little indication
that a half-century ago Catholic women religious were the targets of their own flurry
of publicity, legislation, and judicial decisions, all directed toward settling the place
of religious garb within American public institutions.
The following six chapters are organized by both chronology and theme. Together
they relate the story of the Dixon case—from the circumstances that precipitated
the Free Schools Committee’s lawsuit through its early litigation and trial in district
court. Each chapter also examines the work of publicly teaching sisters, the legal
principle of church–state separation, and the relationship between them from the
vantage point of the groups who demonstrated interest in Zellers. The book’s first
two chapters are set in New Mexico. Both explore how people who lived there came
by their assumptions about the right relationship of church and state. Chapter One
begins in the nineteenth century, and explains how sister-taught public schools
became part of New Mexico’s culture and why they received support from its His-
pano population. I use a comparative framework here—even as Catholic leaders
elsewhere in the United States were struggling with the prohibitively Protestant
character of “nonsectarian” common schools, the Archdiocese of Santa Fe main-
tained a working relationship with New Mexico’s developing education system. By
the time a formal school code and funding structure appeared near the turn of the
century, however, that system had begun to resemble its American counterparts in
many ways. Its Anglo-Protestant character succeeded in alienating both the Church
hierarchy and many local residents. In New Mexico’s overlooked rural communities,
clergy and laity began to cooperate. Despite their own history of disagreement, a
Hispano population disadvantaged by curricular and funding policies found com-
mon ground with a Church now preoccupied with the loss of parochial students to
the public system.
Chapter Two delves deeper into the local approval for public–parochial
schooling by taking a close look at Dixon and its neighboring community of
Peñasco. Here my focus is on the relationships between Catholic sisters, nearly all
of whom were Anglo transplants to New Mexico, and their Hispano students.
When residents today recollect the sisters who taught them during the 1940s,
any reflections on the legality of their employment take a back seat to descrip-
tions of the respect those women inspired within the community. Here I examine
the respect that students felt for their teachers. I explore the sentiment in light of
the childhood happenings, both positive and negative, that formed it. Through
their demeanor and their appearance, sisters made complicated and lasting
impressions upon children in Spanish-speaking villages. My purpose is to take
students’ word about these encounters, while also learning something of the psy-
chology of New Mexican support for American religious and their schools. The
second chapter finishes its survey of the “local knowledge” of church–state rela-
tions by charting the emergence of a Hispano-Protestant minority in northern
New Mexico during the early twentieth century, and considering the separation
platform its members first articulated in Dixon during the 1940s.
In Chapter Three I move from New Mexico’s students to its teachers, to
think about how the Catholic religious at the center of captive schooling litiga-
tion themselves engaged the separation ethic. My focus here is the stuff of their
classrooms—the objects and activities that became fodder for the Zellers suit. I
consider these as tactical products that enabled Catholic sisters to survive pro-
fessionally, at least for at time, in between public and parochial schooling mod-
els. Each day, sisters made unscripted decisions aimed at bringing their
classrooms and their persons into compliance with the state’s curricular expec-
tations and the religious mandates enforced by the 1917 Code. Although they
never talked at length about the challenges their work entailed, many things
about the way they taught—from the textbooks they distributed, to the way
they scheduled their class time, to the images they hung on their walls—were
geared toward achieving a sustainable balance between religious and civil influ-
ences in their classrooms. I argue that, rather than demonstrating disregard for
church–state separation, the sisters who taught publicly were caught trying to
juggle competing Catholic and civil impulses to keep the church and state apart
from one another in their work.
Chapters Four and Five head east to Washington D.C. to consider the involve-
ment of legal advocacy groups in Zellers and the captive schooling litigation that
followed it through the 1950s. Together they demonstrate that both Protestant
and Catholic legal experts relied on recognizably religious arguments about church
and state to secure a stake in the public conversation about the Establishment
Clause and its wall of separation at mid-century. The fourth chapter interrogates
POAU and the captive schools campaign it created and promoted in response to
sister-taught public education. New Mexico’s schools and others like them became
mediums for deferring differences among the organization’s broad coalition of
Protestants. The captivity rhetoric the group employed when it got involved in
Dixon was both a flexible entrée into litigation and a rallying cry meant to remind
its members and the American public of the foundational relationship between
Protestantism and the First Amendment. In Chapter Five I travel to the other side
of the era’s church–state debates to look at the work of the NCWC. I pay attention
here to the sight of religious garb within public classrooms, as it became a pressing
issue among the American public and the American judicial system in the context
of sister-taught schooling litigation. I explore the difficulties the NCWC’s legal
department faced as it tried to find a cogent defense of the right of Catholic sisters
to teach publicly in that garb. While POAU was adamant about preserving the dis-
tinctive relationship between the Protestant tradition and the First Amendment’s
religion clauses, Catholic legal experts struggled to find a theologically sound basis
Introduc tion 21
for asserting a similar type of relationship. Their failure to do so on behalf of sisters,

in New Mexico and elsewhere, eventually left the NCWC’s attorneys little choice
but to advise those women to remove their habits or retreat from public employ-
ment altogether. In its policy of avoiding litigation at all costs, the NCWC reluc-
tantly found itself guiding Catholic dioceses and religious orders into compliance
with a de facto model of separation that was stronger even than many courts of the
era demanded.
The book’s last chapter returns to New Mexico to recount the Zellers trial. For a
nine-day stretch in 1948, the courtroom in Santa Fe was the setting for a contest that
pitted the parties explored in this book directly against one another. Attorneys from
Washington came face to face with New Mexico’s residents—most visibly with doz-
ens of Catholic sisters who took the witness stand and spoke about their teaching.
This chapter’s emphasis is on the dispiriting test sisters faced as they tried to trans-
late their work into legally defensible categories. Just as the NCWC was ill prepared
to offer a sustained defense of publicly employed sisters, the women themselves
were unable to conform either in principle or in practice to the separation standard
demanded by both the plaintiffs and the court. Embarrassed on behalf of sisters
who suffered public humiliation at trial, and unwilling to allow them to teach in
secular classrooms, the superiors of most of the communities involved in New Mex-
ico recalled their members from public work in the state. Not long after, the state’s
supreme court made their departure law on the grounds of the clothing they wore.
The book concludes with an epilogue that recounts the appeal of Zellers to New
Mexico’s high court. I also take the opportunity in this final section to reflect on the
legacy of sister-taught schooling litigation. I end with some thoughts about what
these fights over the Catholic habit add to our understanding of controversies sur-
rounding the Islamic veil in twenty-first-century public spaces.
Because this study happens at the intersection of legal and popular understand-
ings of the church–state relationship, the source material I employ throughout it is
diverse. Legal treatises, school texts and curricula, judicial opinions, court tran-
scripts, and popular forms of media all play important parts in this book. During
research on the project I also conducted interviews, both with former students who
attended sister-taught public schools in New Mexico and with women who taught
in them. At their request, I have assigned pseudonyms to some of these sources.
Others chose to use their true identities. I am grateful for the time and effort all of
these people put into recounting events that happened more than a half-century
ago. I have done my best to treat their memories with care.
A final note that is methodological and also personal: Although Catholic sisters
who taught publicly were aware that special challenges came with their civil employ-
ment, they always—so far as I can tell—approached their work educating children
as a natural extension of their religious vocation. This is why they agreed to it. The
“public” nature of that work was first treated as something different, and strange and
problematic, by separation advocates, including those who took these women to

court. As the latest party to isolate their work’s public quality, I do it because I
believe it tells us things about religious life that the closely guarded, parochial
endeavors of the era cannot. That said, my interest in the public dimension of sisters’
work is one the women themselves didn’t share. Clifford Geertz once wrote that,
just as legal knowledge situates what happens in one’s world within a local structure
of “what is lawful,” so knowledge produced by the anthropologist should situate
what happens in her subjects’ world within a local structure of “what is grammati-
cal.”34 My decision to dwell here on publicly employed sisters over their parochial
counterparts might (if I were lucky enough to catch his attention at all!) have caused
Geertz to wag a finger in my direction. Sister-taught public education is a phenom-
enon that resonates against my own cultural framework for what is grammatical—or
oddly ungrammatical—about these women’s lives, and why.
Even so, I hope the tension that results—between the perspectives of my sub-
jects and the value-laden outlook I bring with me to this historical encounter—is a
productive one. My own cultural framework upon which this narration hangs is
assembled of mismatched pieces. It’s informed by fond memories of attending a
Catholic high school in Indiana and by my current employment at a Catholic insti-
tution outside of Philadelphia. It’s also informed by my sympathies with feminism,
pluralism, and church–state separation—the product of a generally liberal upbring-
ing, reinforced by training at liberal institutions with Quaker and Presbyterian
roots. New Mexico’s Catholic sisters first attracted me because they confused my
allegiances and left me unsure about what sorts of judgments I would make about
the Dixon affair were I asked ever to lay them down. The discord between the value
of church–state separation and the worth of sisters’ work remains alive throughout
this history because it’s alive in my own mind. I hope this tension gives the book a
polyvocal quality. I don’t see any need to force its resolution.
This is a story about the search for common meaning, and also about its limits. I
entered the study with my own ideas—about the value of church–state separation
and about the value of sisters’ work in education and the public sphere—but well
aware of their cultural peculiarity, their fragility, and their fallibility. The following
pages tell a history of public work, but I’ve tried to allow my subjects and their critics
to talk back in word and in practice, rebuffing whatever undue suggestions I make
about what public visibility implies. An anthropologist friend recently reminded me
that as scholars we come to know things through dialogue with the people we study.
This is even true of historians. The same subjects who help build our knowledge of
the past remain capable of unsettling that knowledge at every turn. Here the incom-
patibilities between legal vernaculars—between those notions of separation debated
in mid-century legal circles, those enacted through the teaching of Catholic sisters,
and also those I bring with me—run like fissures that destabilize my retelling of the
Dixon case. My hope is that, rather than compromising the end result, those fissures
will relieve some of the artificial pressure produced by history making.
| 1 |
Educating in the Vernacular
The Foundations of Sister-Taught Public Schools
On an autumn day in 1912 a Roman Catholic priest named Peter Küppers arrived
in Santa Fe. The train trip west had left him tired and frazzled. Unable to commu-
nicate with either the English-speaking conductor or his fellow passengers, the
German native had found himself questioning once or twice along the way whether
he ever would reach New Mexico in safety. Küppers disembarked on the platform
still shaken from his most recent misadventure; his attempt to change locomotives
at a junction earlier in the day had ended with him confronting a pack of charging
dogs, armed only with his umbrella. The “ratt ling and shaking of the litt le train” as
it crawled on toward Santa Fe afterwards did nothing to calm his nerves.1 The
twenty-seven-year-old priest missed the comforts of his seminary in Switzerland,
and he wondered whether he had made the right decision when he accepted the
invitation to come to New Mexico from Archbishop John Baptist Pitaval of Santa
Fe. As Küppers made his way from the train station toward the cathedral he felt ill
prepared for the work he had agreed to, sight unseen, in this remote corner of the
United States. The mud-plastered homes he walked past on that fi rst day were
astonishing to him, and the people he called “Mexicans” spoke a language that to
his ears sounded like Greek. The heat from local chiles made tears roll down his
cheeks when the famished priest fi nally sat down to a meal. Bookish, bespectacled,
and prone to illness even at his young age, it never crossed Peter Küppers’ mind he
might stay to live out his days in these unaccommodating environs.2
But he did stay. By the time of his death in 1957, Father Küppers had grown into
a larger-than-life figure in his adopted home. Even during his lifetime his reputation
assumed near-mythic proportions. Küppers was both well loved and much resented
by the people who knew him. To some of the state’s residents, he was nothing short
of heroic—a twentieth-century successor to the legendary Padre Martínez, who
built schools in communities that had none and who fought tooth and nail for the
interests of the people he worked among, even when those interests conflicted with
the government or the archdiocese itself. Like the padre a century before him,
23
Küppers was arguably the most influential New Mexican priest of his generation. To
other New Mexicans, Küppers was difficult and cunning, manipulative and even
immoral. He drank liquor and smoked his cigars unapologetically. He had a quick
temper that often showed itself during his interactions with superiors—four succes-
sive archbishops of Santa Fe. As an old man he chose to live in provocative comfort,
with a pair of female housekeepers and quartet of Great Danes, on a lush private
orchard he called Obscurana. One local reporter who met the priest’s gigantic pets
quipped, “They have only two dislikes: people carrying shovels and people carrying
anything out of Father Küppers’ ranch.”3 For years rumors circulated about the
priest’s personal life, and sometimes those rumors had merit. In 1934 then Arch-
bishop Rudolph Gerken removed Küppers from active service in the archdiocese
following accusations of embezzlement and general immorality.4 Even this censor-
ship did little to curb the priest’s influence within New Mexico.
Peter Küppers built his reputation—his accolades as well as his infamy—through
his life-long efforts to erect and maintain schools in the parishes he served. If his
dream of making education “bloom in the desert” was uncontroversial on its sur-
face, the priest’s tactics for building and running those schools contributed more
than any other behavior from his long and varied career to his Jekyll and Hyde repu-
tation in the state.5 Like any ambitious educator in a cash-strapped economy, Küp-
pers found his best-laid plans for children’s schooling assaulted by the realities of the
impoverished communities where he worked. Rather than scale back his vision for
want of money, the priest was driven by these challenges to look for creative solu-
tions to fund local schools. Many times those solutions led him into the political life
Figure 1.1 Father Peter Küppers at work with a group of Dominican sisters. Courtesy
of Tomas Jaehn.
Educating in the Ver nacular 25
of a community, and often they required him to disregard all boundaries between
things of his church and things of the state.
The priest discovered his acumen for building schools during his first assignment
in New Mexico. Chaperito was a parish with six hundred families and fifteen mis-
sions, scattered across San Miguel County in the eastern part of the state.6 When
Küppers took over clerical responsibilities in Chaperito in 1913 he was upset to
learn his new parish lacked a school, and especially dismayed to discover its Catho-
lic children were attending a nearby Presbyterian institution. The young priest made
education in Chaperito his priority. Küppers began by appealing to the archdiocese
and anyone else he thought might be willing to bankroll a new Catholic school.
Within a short time, however, he realized his most promising educational allies—
and those with the deepest pocketbooks—were sitting in the local government. He
revised his strategy in Chaperito accordingly. With support from several Catholic
politicians, Küppers drafted a proposal to redraw the educational map of San Miguel
County. Adding new school districts to the county would require new public
schools to be opened—including one in the vicinity of the parish.7 Once his redis-
tricting proposal was on the books, Küppers took responsibility for building Chap-
erito’s first public school. He dynamited rock in a local quarry himself, and paid
residents to transport the loose stones back to the building site.8 He oversaw every
detail of the construction. The enterprising priest also found teachers to staff the
school. Before the start of the academic year Küppers invited a community of Cath-
olic religious in exile from Mexico to come to Chaperito. The sisters soon began
work as public teachers, and the county school board agreed to pay their salaries.9
The Chaperito school was the first of many public ventures Peter Küppers had a
hand in during his career in northern New Mexico. It was also a portent of things
stirring across the region. New Mexico had become a state a year earlier, and state-
hood brought with it the obligation for an expansive—and an adequately staffed—
public education system. Schools taught by Catholic sisters began to open across
New Mexico during the 1910s to meet the demands of this developing system. In
addition to Chaperito, sisters began to teach in public institutions in San Miguel in
1914, Villanueva and Cuba in 1916, and Parkview in 1918.10 New Mexican state-
hood precipitated the largest-ever influx of sister-teachers to the region; while three
religious communities had received public funds to teach in the nineteenth century,
between 1900 and 1947 women from more than a dozen different congregations
accepted employment in the state’s schools. By the 1940s Catholic sisters had relo-
cated to the Southwest from places like Denver, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Olden-
burg, Indiana. More than one hundred thirty of them taught publicly in the state,
and together they were responsible for the education of thousands of students. Both
the public and the Catholic education systems in New Mexico counted these sisters’
schools as their own.
If statehood provided the impetus for large numbers of sisters to teach publicly
in New Mexico, the long-term success of their schools turned upon the will of the
state’s Hispano residents. Spanish-speaking people represented a strong majority in

every New Mexican community where sisters taught publicly, and their endorse-
ment of sister-directed public education allowed it to flourish across multiple gen-
erations. When sisters arrived in New Mexico to teach, they received warm
receptions from local clergy, politicos, and residents alike. According to one survey
taken in the 1940s, more than four out of five residents approved of the sisters in
their public schools.11 The support of Hispanos for women religious derived in part
from their religious loyalties; the austere presence of Catholic nuns robed in black,
brown, or white habits inspired respect, even veneration, among these mainly
Catholic people. The women relished the goodwill of locals who volunteered their
time and scarce resources to help build their convents and maintain their school
buildings. At the same time, this enthusiasm for sisters masked complicated senti-
ments embedded in the relationship of Hispanos to their schools. Educational his-
tory in New Mexico reveals a fraught backstory to the Hispano-Catholic alliance
that made sister-taught public schools possible in the first part of the twentieth cen-
tury. It suggests that motivations other than just religious affinity made church–
state separation undesirable—or at least irrelevant—to the New Mexicans who
supported those schools. Religious loyalty was important in New Mexico, but that
loyalty was always qualified, contingent, and entangled with other interests.
A Hispano-Catholic educational alliance took time to develop in New Mexico.
Native-born residents’ early interactions with both public and Catholic schools in
the territory had been lukewarm at best. A pattern of clerical–popular coopera-
tion eventually cohered from this rough beginning, but it was based more upon
the challenges of a changing educational landscape than upon some natural affin-
ity. In the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, Anglo-Ameri-
can transplants to New Mexico introduced a series of proposals for public
education in the territory and later the state. Most of these people were Protes-
tants, and although their ideas about schooling varied with one another and
changed over time, there were persistent qualities about them that bothered both
Catholic officials and Hispano residents. From the Catholic leadership’s perspec-
tive, the prevailing nineteenth-century model of American education was itself
offensively Protestant, despite advocates’ avowals of nonsectarianism and reli-
gious liberty. Even as the Church in New Mexico was beneficiary of the territory’s
first education funds, elsewhere in the country Catholic leaders battled school
officials who insisted on promoting Bible reading and other Protestant devotions
while excluding Catholic equivalents from their classrooms. As New Mexico
moved toward statehood, Church leaders there worried about an educational sys-
tem that appeared be going the way of public schooling elsewhere in the United
States. Meanwhile, Hispano residents in the region also balked, reacting both to
Americanizing impulses within the system and to a funding apparatus that
diverted educational resources away from their communities. Living predomi-
nantly in rural villages isolated from the decision-making processes in Santa Fe,
these people had little preexisting sympathy for either the structure or the content
of the system put into place around them.
The sister-taught public schools that multiplied after statehood were practical
arrangements struck between Anglo-Catholic clergy and religious and Hispano-
Catholic residents. These groups still had distinct interests and imperfectly aligned
educational visions, but in the first decades of the twentieth century they coex-
isted on the margins of an emergent state school system. Their cooperation had
roots in a shared Catholic faith and a common desire to instill that faith in chil-
dren, but it was made secure and tenable by something else—a shared ambiva-
lence over the design and purpose of this expanding system. Their uneasiness gave
Hispano residents and the Catholic leaders in their communities a common
incentive to piece together other schooling models along the borders of the exist-
ing public infrastructure. While New Mexico’s educational system was still in its
early stages, it preserved a space along its borders for just this sort of improvisa-
tional work. New state laws governing schooling contrasted sharply with the isola-
tion of rural districts and the autonomy those districts retained in decisions about
facilities and faculty. The schools that residents, clergy, and local officials con-
structed took into account the state’s imperatives, but they were also vernacular
products, which modified those imperatives to reflect the interests of the partici-
pants and the needs of the community. When litigation threatened sister-taught
schools in the 1940s, the incomplete affinity between Hispanos and the Catholic
Church revealed itself in other ways. Some Hispanos ended up on the side of sep-
aration. While most Catholic residents objected to the lawsuit that tried to close
their schools, and dismissed the church–state principle that undergirded it, their
reasons for doing so were distinct from those of teaching religious and of the
Archdiocese of Santa Fe.
Historians and other people who are interested in New Mexico’s territorial days
often make two assumptions about education. The first is that education in New
Mexico began with the Anglos who moved to the region in the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury. The second is that an uncomplicated, or even natural, affinity has always
existed between the Catholic Church and the region’s Hispano residents when it
comes to children and schools.12 Neither assumption is correct. Nineteenth-cen-
tury New Mexico was a place where both Hispano and Native American residents
with their own educational traditions encountered Anglo-American newcomers,
who brought with them different ideas about how the territory’s children should be
schooled. While the number of schools in the new territory did increase signifi-
cantly after the arrival of Anglos to the region, Hispano inhabitants had been exper-
imenting with their own schools for more than two centuries under both Spanish
and Mexican rule. Although the first Anglo educators in New Mexico professed the
same Catholic faith as the region’s Spanish-speaking population, they brought dis-
ruptive educational ideas with them. Residents were generally reluctant subscribers
to the pedagogical vision imported by the new Catholic leadership who arrived in
the territory in the middle of the nineteenth century.
New Mexico’s remote location, its rugged landscape, and its struggling economy
made a centralized system of schools no more than a far-off hope under Spanish and
Mexican rule, but the province was not without its own educational models and
innovators. Formal schooling had been a continual, if uneven and idiosyncratic,
presence in the region since the Franciscan missions of the seventeenth century.13
When those missions secularized and political control of the region transferred
from New Spain to Mexico in the early nineteenth century, responsibility for educa-
tion in New Mexico dispersed, and a loose group of diocesan clergy and citizens
struggled to open schools in answer to mandates sent by a distant and distracted
Mexico City. During the first half of the century New Mexico was home to between
six and eight publicly funded schools, and the first U.S. census of the territory
counted eighteen public school teachers already at work.14 The most ambitious edu-
cational project managed under Mexican rule was the school founded in 1826 by
Padre Antonio José Martínez, a Catholic priest in Taos. Martínez was a native of the
Upper Rio Grande Basin, and after attending seminary in Durango he returned
home with strong ideas about both the educational and the political needs of his
people. For over forty years the priest oversaw a school of remarkable proportions
in Taos; he educated both boys and girls, offered seminary and legal training, and
printed his own series of textbooks and catechisms for students’ use. He also became
one of the region’s most prominent political figures, first by advocating for Mexican
resistance to American encroachment and eventually by realigning himself with
the United States, to act as president of the first Provincial Territorial Assembly.
With Martínez’s dual interests in education and public life, it is little surprise Peter
Küppers drew favorable comparisons to the priest a century later.15
Martínez was far and away the most influential native-born member of the
Catholic clergy during his generation, but the padre’s work did not signal an endur-
ing alliance between Hispano communities and Catholic educators in northern
New Mexico.16 During Martínez’s own lifetime the prevailing model of Catholic
education in the region changed dramatically. In 1848, Mexico conceded its north-
ernmost territory to the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Among
the earliest and most tangible consequences of this annexation was the transfer of
religious governance over the region. Under Mexican rule, New Mexico’s Catholics
had been a part of the diocese of Durango with an administrative center several
hundred miles away. When political control of the territory shifted to the United
States, the Vatican saw fit to reassign ecclesiastical jurisdiction as well and it created
the new Diocese of Santa Fe in 1853. In a storied decision Pope Pius IX assigned a
French priest named Jean Baptiste Lamy to act as the diocese’s first bishop.
In its early years, the relationship between Lamy and New Mexico’s residents
was anything but amicable. Although the Church already counted the majority of
people living there as Catholics in the mid-nineteenth century, Catholicism in the
territory was a far cry from anything either Lamy or the United States hierarchy
considered orthodox.17 After the Franciscans’ departure from New Mexico the
centralized structure of diocesan authority had failed in the remote region, and reli-
gious authority had redistributed to a few native priests and a growing number of
laymen—members of a mutual aid and penance society called La Fraternidad
Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno, or los penitentes. Lamy later claimed that
upon his arrival in Santa Fe he found only nine priests in all of New Mexico.18 What
the bishop did find was a Catholic population he worried was “almost too primi-
tive”—with a rural culture that had subsisted for decades on the fringes of diocesan
hierarchy, a clergy who publicly defied their vows (particularly those of poverty and
celibacy), and residents who were as likely to gather in penitente meeting houses or
moradas as in the local churches.19
Upon settling in Santa Fe Lamy began to correct what he understood as the fail-
ings of his diocese. His efforts to “civilize” the population—to bring its unrefined
religiosity up to the standards set by Church doctrine and tradition, and its culture
to the standards of both his native Europe and his adopted nation—would charac-
terize his tenure as prelate. He issued prohibitive new rules for the territory’s
penitentes, including instructions that restricted their displays of penance and made
clear their deferential position beneath the hierarchy.20 The bishop circumscribed
the activities of native-born clerics by suspending several New Mexican clergy from
their duties entirely and reassigning others to outlying missions and Indian pueb-
los.21 Lamy notoriously excommunicated the venerable Padre Martínez after the
aging priest rejected the bishop’s choice of a non-native successor for him, and con-
tinued to officiate—first in disobedience and later in open schism—from his pri-
vate Taos residence.22 The bishop’s attempts to rein in both lay and clerical Catholic
activity during his first decade in Santa Fe put him at odds with many of the resi-
dents for whom his ministry was intended. New Mexicans expressed their dismay at
Lamy in several formats. In 1853, members of one parish indirectly challenged the
bishop by publicly accusing his closest colleague of indiscretions that included vio-
lating the seal of confession and comparing locals to “all kinds of savage animals.”
Three years later the Hispano-dominated legislative assembly took their grievances
with the prelate an audacious step further when they wrote directly to Pius IX to
request the Vatican remove Lamy from his office in Santa Fe.23 The Vatican ignored
the petition.
The bishop’s distress over New Mexico’s situation was acute when it came to the
territory’s educational resources. As Lamy traveled across his diocese he observed
that under Mexican rule, “every vestige of school had vanished, churches and school
houses were in a crumbling state and ignorance reigned in the land.”24 To combat this
ignorance he began work on the territory’s first parochial school system, and he
invited the first Catholic women religious to New Mexico to help him with the project.
Acting on his belief that both civilizing and re-Catholicizing the Hispano people
required educators from points east, in 1852 Lamy traveled to central Kentucky to
personally solicit help at the motherhouse of the Sisters of Loretto. Six Lorettine reli-
gious came to Santa Fe the same autumn, and they opened a privately funded girls’
school in the city the following year.25 Our Lady of Light Academy—nicknamed la
casa Americana by locals because of the gabled architecture that distinguished its
building from the flat-roofed adobes of Santa Fe—offered a European-style educa-
tion to students who could afford the $300 annual tuition, as well as to select day
school students who were admitted at a reduced rate.26 Girls of varying ages received
instruction in the skills and disciplines sisters deemed proper for young Catholic
women. The academy’s offerings were celebrated in the local press at its opening:
The Sisters . . . gave their elementary pupils instruction in orthography,

reading, writing, grammar, arithmetic, geography, and history. The more
advanced pupils studied ‘Astronomy with the use of globes, Natural Phi-
losophy, Botany, etc., etc.’ They also gave instruction in needle work, bor-
dering, drawing, painting, music on the piano and guitar, vocal music,
and French. . . . Two weeks later the school was offering additional sub-
jects. . . . Among these were bookkeeping, algebra, geometry, mensura-
tion, surveying, logic, Latin, and Greek. It was stated that ‘the English
language is taught in the college with care.’ . . . ‘Scholars are required to
speak it even during the hours of recreation.’27
The Catholic religious offered an expansive education the likes of which New
Mexicans had never seen. Studying with the sisters was not easy, even for girls
whose parents paid dearly to send them to the academy. One former student
remarked years later, “I have never forgotten how the sisters tried to instill into our
hearts a little bit of culture, and the hard time they had doing it.”28
Our Lady of Light Academy represented the arrival of Catholic women religious
within New Mexico’s educational world. Over the next decade the Sisters of Loretto
expanded their mission to the territory north, opening a school in Taos in an effort
to win its Catholics from the renegade Martínez and local penitentes.29 During the
same period the sisters also opened schools in the village of Mora to the northeast
of Santa Fe, and in the cities of Albuquerque and Las Vegas. In 1873, Annunciation
Academy in Mora became the first sister-run school in New Mexico to receive pub-
lic funds for its support.30 Bishop Lamy soon invited other Catholic religious com-
munities to the territory to join the Sisters of Loretto in their educational work.
These included the French Christian Brothers, who began to open boys’ schools in
New Mexico in 1859, Italian Jesuits in 1867, the Cincinnati-based Sisters of Charity
in 1865, and the Irish Sisters of Mercy in 1880. Together these five congregations
staffed all of territorial New Mexico’s Catholic schools.31
The early interactions between New Mexico’s Catholic clergy and religious and its
Hispano residents were marred by difference and occasionally by open conflict.
Although the parochial schools built during Lamy’s prelateship offered a Catholic
education to Catholic children, they also pressured students and parents to change
their minds about what that Catholicism and that learning should entail. As the
century wore on, however, these early disputes became less important. Another
set of schooling models began to gain traction in the territory, and their precepts
proved challenging for Catholic leaders and Hispano residents alike. This third
perspective on New Mexican education was imported by Anglo Protestants and
built around the common goal of a public school system. With the exception of
Lamy and the religious he invited to come and work with him, transplants to the
New Mexican territory were nearly all Protestants who hailed from the Eastern
and Midwestern United States. The first of these residents arrived as part of the
military conquest and political transfer of the region, and those pioneers were
joined through the second half of the nineteenth century by an assortment of bold
personalities—ranchers who expanded their ranges west from Texas, home mis-
sionaries (many of them women), and industrial entrepreneurs and laborers who
arrived with the railroads in 1879. By the turn of the century these men and women
were also joined by artists and tourists, many of whom visited and settled on the
Spanish and Native American land grants in and around the Rio Grande Basin.32
In 1850, ninety-five percent of New Mexico’s population was native born, either
Hispano or Native American. By 1910 that number had shrunk to just over half.
This inundation of first-generation inhabitants was made up almost entirely of
Protestant Americans.33 As New Mexico’s population grew over the nineteenth
century, these Anglos became a visible presence in the region’s public institutions,
and they eventually gained a controlling voice in the territory’s political leadership.
Most Anglo Protestants agreed with Bishop Lamy that New Mexico’s residents
were ignorant and unrefined. Their theories on the origins of this ignorance dif-
fered. Early accounts penned by Protestants in the territory suggest that, while
some suspected the discouraging qualities of the Hispano people were innate, a
product of mingling Spanish and Indian blood, others attributed their backward-
ness directly to the Catholic Church’s influence.34 They blamed education as the
medium for that influence. Observers in the region wrote of Catholic priests
contriving to “entangle the mind [sic] of their pupils in the meshes of superstition
and bigotry” and teaching “dogma and spiritual terrors” as a means of condition-
ing children for the “final mental slavery to which they are destined.”35 Motivated
by these concerns, Protestants matched Catholics in touting correct education
as the centerpiece of the new territory’s development. The first territorial gover-
nor, James Calhoun, stressed the importance of education in his inaugural mes-
sage to the legislature, writing that “nothing will more surely contribute to the
mental and moral force of a people, than a well devised system of common
schools.”36 In light of their suspicion that the Church was the source of New
Mexico’s problems, Protestants’ calls for education also took on a distinctive tone.
Public schooling was required to properly educate the Hispano people and to
break the crippling influence of the Church upon their culture. If those schools
were to imitate their counterparts elsewhere in the nation—and arrivals to the
territory hoped they would—then teachers would accomplish these goals with
help from a curriculum that was both American and Protestant.
Most Anglo Protestants in New Mexico relocated from places where public edu-
cation was well established. By the mid-nineteenth century public or common
schools were staples in urban centers throughout the eastern half of the United
States, where they existed to educate the poor and working classes unable to afford
private study. As the first wave of Catholic immigration reached the nation’s shores
in the 1830s and 1840s, common schools assumed responsibility for assimilating
that population to an American way of life. It was widely agreed that their Protestant
character was key to this work. As Irish newcomers settled in the nation’s cities in
large numbers, many in the country feared their foreign customs and especially
their religious loyalties would overwhelm a still-young American culture and gov-
ernment.37 Similar concern extended to the nation’s expanding western perimeter,
where some Americans worried that Catholic settlement in sparsely populated
areas might tip the political scales against democracy. These apprehensions were
rooted in beliefs that the Church opposed values like liberty and individualism,
which democracy rested upon, and that its agenda in the United States was political
as well as pastoral. Although he wrote more than a decade before New Mexico
joined the American frontier, Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher presented
Catholic settlements as cause for alarm in the collection of sermons he published as
A Plea for the West. Beecher was adamant that Protestant-guided education was the
only solution for establishing American values in the nation’s remote regions. “The
thing required for the civil and religious prosperity of the West,” he wrote, “is
universal education.”38 He returned to this theme later in the tract:
We must educate! We must educate! . . . If in our haste to be rich and

mighty, we outrun our literary institutions, they will never overtake us;
or only come up after the batt le for liberty is fought and lost . . . as
resources for inexorable despotism for the perpetuity of our bondage. 39
For Beecher, Catholicism was the despotism that threatened to fill any educational
vacuum left open as the United States expanded westward.
Although Beecher’s plea was for Protestant missionaries to supervise education,
by mid-century even missionaries were beginning to support publicly funded
schools as the preferred medium for imparting the core tenets of Protestantism on
children and for preserving the nation’s exceptional character. For most Americans
these objectives were one and the same. As Lamy began to build Catholic schools in
New Mexico in the 1850s, his episcopal colleagues elsewhere in the country were
preoccupied by common institutions that required all their students—Catholic
ones included—to receive Christian instruction. The explicitly Protestant character
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
For the roadster and coupé there comes what is called the “Carefree
Folding Outfit for Touring, Camping, Dining, Sleeping.” This is an
attachment weighing 160 pounds which is easily attached to the rear of a
roadster or coupé in half an hour by fastening four bolts. This outfit gives
the camper a comfortable elevated bed, a storm-tight shelter, a folding
dining table, handy while preparing meals and during meals, a writing or
work table between meals, plenty of room for suit cases and camp
equipment, [36]a special food compartment, a separate bedding
compartment, a sun or rain shelter under extensible canvas during the
day, and three minutes’ time converts the outfit into a thoroughly
practical sleeping room.
One concern, the Auto Bed Manufacturing Company, makes what they
call “The A.B.C. Sleeper” for Fords only. It provides means for making a
real spring cushion bed for two adults in a car of this type. It can be used
with the top up or down.
This same concern makes what they term the “Universal Car Bed” for
every car, and which is also a perfect fit for a Ford. It is built on a
patented principle of sagless tension, and has a bed mat of heavy
canvas, olive drab in color. It is guaranteed not to scratch or mar the car.
This bed is priced at $18.00. The A.B.C. Sleeper, for Ford cars only, is
listed at $7.50. Prices referred to in this and other chapters are taken
from catalogues, but are subject to change and are given that the reader
may have a general idea of the cost.
The American Camp Equipment Company makes a car bed which is

comparatively inexpensive ($11.45) and will fit a Ford as well as a
Packard. It may also be set up outside of the car as a double cot for use
in a tent or house. This appliance is called the Moto Bed.
A convenient and inexpensive piece of equipment for a Ford car of any

model is the Carefree Luggagett. It fits on either running board. There is
no drilling. It is fastened with a strap hook. It affords [37]a closed tight
space for carrying loose articles. It has a smooth retainer wall with no
rivets or lugs to tear or wear holes in luggage. Since container space is
closed, no strapping or tying is necessary. It allows the doors to open
over it. It may be attached or detached in a minute. It is substantial and
weighs only 7½ pounds. [38]
[Contents]
CHAPTER V
A HOME-MADE CAMPING OUTFIT
Standing the Test of an 8,000 Mile Trip—Good Water Supply Everywhere—

Army Cots and Canvas the Basis of Outfit—Complete Directions—Mosquito
Netting Sides Permit Adequate Ventilation.
One of the most interesting experiences in motor camping of which we

have known is that of Mr. Frederick W. Huntington of Brooklyn, N. Y.
His trip is of particular significance, not primarily in being adventurous,
but because it illustrates what any one can accomplish through
ingenuity at very moderate expense.
Mr. and Mrs. Huntington traveled from New York City to California, on
an 8,000-mile route, in nine weeks’ time, driving every day, and
camping every night without a mishap.
They encountered wind-storms and rain-storms, but their equipment

stood all the blasts and proved waterproof all the time. In some places
the mosquitoes sang in the vicinage by night, but were never admitted
to the society of the campers. The travelers report excellent roads all
of the way to the Mississippi, and passable highways all the way across
the continent. They were never more than forty miles from a good
water supply. They found [39]camp sites in nearly all the towns beyond
the Appalachians, but seldom used them, preferring usually to camp in
some secluded spot near the roadside. In fact, they discovered that
unless one arrives fairly early in the afternoon, many of the camping
parks will be found to be crowded already, with little room for the late-
comer.
The striking feature of this trip is the tent equipment which Mr.
Huntington designed. It is simple and effective. With a little aid from a
local machine shop, or even a blacksmith shop, it can be made by any
prospective camper. Accordingly, a description is given herewith
showing just how Mr. Huntington constructed his outfit. The drawings
which accompany this chapter will serve to clarify the text.
[Contents]
Two Army Cots the Basis
The basis of the Huntington tent structure is two ordinary army cots
placed side by side, six inches apart. A hole is bored in each crosspiece
at the end near the adjoining cot, both at the head and at the foot of
the bed. The next step is to take two brass rods about three-eighths
inch in diameter and twelve inches in length. Have a machinist bend
each rod into the shape of a double-pointed matting-tack, with the
horizontal part eight inches in length. Thread the ends of the two side
pieces so that they become screw bolts. Then insert these two devices
into the holes aforementioned. Secure them with nuts fitting the
threaded ends of the rods, and [40]you have the two cots fastened
securely together (Fig. 1).
Basis for home-made tenting outfit built by Mr. Frederick W.
Huntington of Brooklyn, N. Y. Note the two standard army cots,
the canvas trough, the sticks of the frame work, and the design
of the joints.
[Contents]
The Improvised Floor

The next feature is the canvas trough which supplies a floor on which
one stands while getting into bed or dressing. This protects the feet
from the ground, and keeps insects from coming up from the ground.
To prepare for this trough, attach five tapes or strips of canvas about
nine inches in length in a row at even intervals along the cloth of each
cot about nine inches from the inner edge. Then take a piece of tent
canvas fifty-eight inches wide by six feet six inches long. Along the
outer edges of this attach tapes which are to be tied with the tapes
attached to the cot, giving a U-shaped trough six inches in width and
with a depth determined by the height of the cots from the ground,
with the edges overlapping six inches on the cots. The ends of the
trough are stopped by pieces of cloth eight inches wide by twenty-four
inches in length, the extra length permitting a six-inch flap at the top
of each end of the trough and the extra width allowing for seams (Fig.
2).
[Contents]
Framework for the Tent

The framework of the tent is built up from the cots. To construct this,
first bore four three-eighths-inch holes, one at each of the outside
ends of the [41]crosspieces of the cots. Then screw in four screw-eyes
near those holes through which the brass rods are inserted (Fig. 3).
Next take two strips of hardwood eighteen inches in length, using
about three-quarter-inch stuff; also two more similar strips three feet
nine inches in length. Bevel the ends of these pieces of wood so that
when joined they will appear as in Fig. 4, left. The joints for these tent
supports are the most difficult part of the construction. They will
probably have to be made at a machine shop. Each consists of a one-
quarter-inch brass rod (about the size of a fat pencil) with holes drilled
in the lower end for the attachment of wires. Passing through and
welded to each rod is a one-half-inch-wide metal strip extending out
about one-half inch at either side forming wings, with a hole drilled
through each wing. Slits or deep grooves about three-fourths inch in
depth should then be cut in the beveled end of each stick or support
into which the wings are fitted. Holes should be bored through the
sticks to correspond with the holes in the wings. Bolts are then passed
through the holes and hammered at each end so as to clinch them,
thus preventing their slipping out (Fig. 4, left).
In the lower end of each of the upright sticks of this device a quarter-
inch hole is bored and a piece of dowel stick glued into the hole. A thin
wire nail driven into the upright and a binding of copper wire help to
secure the dowel stick (Fig. 6).
Detail of framework of home-made camping outfit. Note in Fig.
6 how the little piece of dowel stick is inserted into the upright
of the tent frame. Figs. 7 and 9 show how the frame and cots
are assembled, while Fig. 8 gives detail for wiring.
You now have a framework secured by brass [42]joints and fitted at the
lower end with wooden posts which rest in the outer holes at the ends
of the cots (Figs. 7 and 9). As the illustrations indicate, the framework
described must be made in duplicate, one for each end of the tent.
From the holes in the two corner joints of this arrangement picture
wire is stretched to the screw-eyes at the inner ends of the crosspieces
and secured by snap-buckles (Fig. 8, left).
At each end of the tent a flat piece of brass, two and a half inches long
and three-quarter inches wide is the means employed for the guy
ropes and ridge wire. There are three holes in the brass piece, one for
the guy rope, the center one for the center post in the tent’s
framework, and the third for the ridge wire (Fig. 8, center and right).
The exterior of the tent is similar to that of an ordinary tent in shape.

It can be made from any quality of duck, but should be waterproofed
when completed. Waterproofing preparations can be bought at most
sporting goods or hardware stores.
[Contents]
Dimensions of the Tent

The slope of the roof of the tent on each side is three feet ten inches
by six feet six inches. The outside walls below the slope are twenty-
one inches by six feet six inches. These are the dimensions for the
outside of the tent and the pattern for its construction is shown in Fig.
10. One feature that will [43]be noted is that the outside flaps are fitted
with holes for tapes so that they may be tied back to the ridge,
permitting the freer flow of air.
[Contents]
Mosquito Netting Side Curtains
The inner side flaps are similar to the outer, except that a stretch of
sixteen inches of mosquito netting is inserted running from end to end
of the tent wall (Fig. 11). Top fits end of pole 10 again.
The bottom strip of the inner side-flaps referred to in the above

paragraph is of sufficient length so that six inches of it can be turned in
to lie along the outer side of the cot. The weight of mattress, blankets
or whatever is used to sleep on will keep this turned-in flap from
coming out.
Along the ridge on the inside of the tent is secured a seven-inch-wide

strip running the length of the tent (Fig. 11). By use of the clips or pins
this serves as a clothes rack at night.
[Contents]
Tent Ends
The only feature that remains to be considered is the ends of the tent.
These ends, illustrated in the upper part of Figure 12, are thirty-six
inches wide at the base, fifty inches high at the inner edge, twenty
inches high at the outer edge, and forty-five inches along the shoulder.
These dimensions permit an outside overhang of four inches at the
bottom. [44]An eight-inch inside flap is sewed on four inches from the
bottom, and is turned under the mattress, or sleeping bag, when the
tent is closed.
It is advisable to make a waterproof bag in which to carry the tent.

This done, the equipment consists of the following main items:
2 army cots.
2 brass connecting rods with nuts.
1 trough.
1 tent.
1 bag.
2 rigging devices with ropes.
6 stakes.
The total outfit weighs under sixty pounds.
The Huntingtons carried this equipment in a two-compartment box on

the rear of a Ford roadster. The size of this box was 42¾ by 37⅛ by
20½ inches. One compartment was devoted to this equipment and the
other carried two suit cases, blocks and tackle, and water bottles. They
also carried a running board cupboard, the dimensions of which were
45 by 28 by 8¾ inches.
This outfit, with ponchos, blankets, and extra clothing, constituted the
entire equipment.
Cooking utensils were not a serious factor in this trip, as the desire to
cover a long distance in a limited amount of time caused the travelers
to purchase most of their meals en route rather than take the time
required for cooking.
Tent pattern of home-made camping outfit. Note in the upper
part of Fig. 10 the little tab sewed on at the tent corner, holding
the ring to which the side guy ropes are secured. Another
feature is the mosquito netting inside flaps which permit free
circulation of air. Fig. 11 is a strip of canvas along the ridge
which, with pins or clips, serves as a hanger for clothes.
[45]
The feature of the compartment described above is that the two

compartments are horizontal, the lower being covered by the false
bottom of the upper. Equipment not needed at every stop is kept in the
lower compartment and hence is not in the way when the campers are
packing or unpacking.
The Huntington compartment is covered with waterproof canvas

affixed with curtain cleats.
End pieces of tent of home-made camping outfit, and the way
the design appears when closed. Note the various cross cords
and tapes which permit of close tying in case of storms.
Normally the side flap is tied back, with the inner mosquito
netting flap acting as side wall, since the latter permits of
better ventilation.
[46]
[Contents]
CHAPTER VI
EQUIPMENT FOR THE JOURNEY
(See Chapter V on a Home-made Camping Outfit)
Motor Bungalows—Trailers—Tents: Those Extending from the Car; Those

Resting upon the Ground, but Attached to the Car, and Tents Separate from
the Car—How to Estimate Canvas Duck—More Elaborate Tents—Combination
Tent-beds—Car Beds—Cooking Equipment—Wood, Oil, Gasoline and Alcohol
Stoves—Campfires and How to Manage Them—Broilers and Grids—Cooking
Utensils—Tools, Lights, etc.—Water Bags and Filters—Canvas Bungalows—
Refrigeration.
Before going into details concerning the various articles in the way of
equipment, such as tents, bedding, cooking utensils, stoves and the
like that contribute to the comfort of the auto camper, it will be well to
consider somewhat the methods by which the car itself can be best
adapted to the purpose of motor touring. Prices referred to in this
chapter, though based on catalogues, can only be approximate, since
the market, as in other products, is variable. It has not been possible
to include here all of the desirable equipment on the market. Typical
examples of the more popular kinds of products are given, so that the
reader may have an idea of the range of the field. [47]
[Contents]
Motor Bungalows
In these days when the gypsy habit is being contracted by many

thousands who tour to the southlands in the winter season and across
the continent during the summertime there are many who find it most
convenient to have special caravan car bodies which in effect are land
yachts or traveling bungalows. Some of a mechanical turn or training
will take one of the standard chassis and build upon it a bungalow top
to suit the owner’s needs and tastes. In other instances a special
bungalow body will be built to order by one or other of the automobile
manufacturers; and local car dealers will give the inquirer a list of body
makers who will undertake this kind of construction.
We give an illustration of a traveling bungalow built for a man

prominently identified with the automobile industry who uses the outfit
in his business, which takes him afar over this country, and also for
gypsy tours with his family in vacation time.
This outfit is a real home. Measuring seventeen feet long and six feet
wide, the house itself contains everything necessary for comfort. The
furniture is skillfully designed so that the tables fold and other pieces
nest into each other for economy in space.
The beds are made up at night from the seats in somewhat the same
manner that a lower berth takes shape under the deft hands of
George, the porter. But these berths are longer, wider and infinitely
more restful. Then the windows are large [48]and can be raised without
the aid of a crowbar. The ventilation is perfect.
As one-third of human life is spent in sleep and a considerable portion

in consuming food, the dining apparatus of this portable home is
designed with the same care as bestowed upon the sleeping quarters.
The table, sufficiently large, folds neatly into a minimum of space. The
refrigerator is commodious enough to meet the expectations of the
keenest appetite.
This gypsy caravan contains five lockers, including one devoted to the
commander’s dress clothes, a tent to provide extra sleeping space on
the roof of the car, a thirty-gallon tank containing water under air
pressure for the shower bath, a writing desk, electric lights
throughout, a two-burner stove, fireless cooker and phonograph.
With this equipment the family toured New England in summer. The
trip totaled 1,666 miles and the entire expense for gasoline, tips,
cleaning and storage was only $66.44, or less than four cents a mile
for the journey.
[Contents]
Opinions Differ on Trailers
The matter of trailers is one of considerable dispute. Some tell of

seeing abandoned trailers left broken down along the roadside. Others
declare that they never knew motor camping comfort until they came
to use a trailer. Undoubtedly a trailer reduces the speed somewhat.
However, the pull of [49]a good trailer only amounts to about twenty-
five pounds, and so will not interfere with reasonable speed. On the
main highways with wide roadways and easy grades a trailer will be a
great convenience and source of comfort and give no trouble. On the
other hand, where the grades are steep and the roads narrow and
crooked the trailer is quite likely to prove a large-sized nuisance. One
can back around a street corner with his trailer in the rear without
great difficulty, but to back one down a stretch of crooked mountain
road to a turn-out so that a descending car may pass him would be
beyond the power of the ordinary driver.
Trailer owners may find trailer regulations of the various states

tabulated in Chapter XIV.
There are several good makes of trailers at moderate prices. One firm
is planning to offer a snug little trailer to follow a motorcycle, which
has a number of points in its favor. As designed it can be attached to
any make of motorcycle, using the rear end of the chassis as a
connecting bar. The end of the trailer is fitted with a double swivel
which fits into a clamp on the side car chassis and is secured there by
a spring locking pin.
[Contents]
Motorbungalow, Junior
Among trailers there is the Motorbungalow which comes in two forms.

There is the Motorbungalow, Junior. This is a real folding house, with
kitchenette, wardrobe space, screened windows, comfortable [50]beds,
large enough when erected to afford two bedrooms or dining-room in
inclement weather. The Motorbungalow, Junior, is light and compact. It
will follow an automobile almost anywhere, carrying all spare
equipment. The erecting of the Motorbungalow, Junior, is very simple
for the walls and roof are permanently secured to the folding frame.
No canvas has to be spread or fastened on during the pitching of the
camp. The bed frames, which are fastened to the sides of the trailer
body, are turned over, the top raised and strapped into position, and
the house is ready for occupancy. It can be done in the dark. The
Motorbungalow, Junior, is listed at $225.00. The Motorbungalow is
built on somewhat the same plans as the Junior of the same name.
Both leave the motor camper with the unimpeded use of his car. Both
have a forged steel axle, roller bearing wheels, 30 by 3½ inch
pneumatic tires, and reënforced steel frame and hardwood floor.
Three trailers. At the top is the Motorbungalow Jr. packed for
the journey. In the middle is the Chenango with sides let down,
giving a bungalow effect. The lowest picture is the Auto-Kamp,
showing the framework ready for the tent top. The framework
folds into a small space when the trailer is on tour.
The Motorbungalow, however, is much more elaborate in its

appointments than the Junior. In interior dimensions there is an open
floor space, 4 by 7 feet. The room size is 9 by 12 feet. There is a
kitchenette containing work table, pockets for knives, forks, spoons,
etc. Special shelves provide for jars and for cooking utensils. There is a
large ice box and an emergency water tank, both finished in white
enamel. A table finished in mahogany with white top acts as an inside
door to kitchenette when touring or when not in use. Then there [51]is
a permanent table formed by the top of the wardrobe and kitchenette
which is four feet wide and triangular in shape. There are side curtains
which are of brown “Fabrikoid,” also curtains to the rear of the same; a
large wardrobe where clothes may be hung at full length, two beds
four feet by six feet two; cotton mattresses two and a half inches
thick, screened windows; back door and step—door locked by key
from inside or out.
[Contents]
Auto-Kamp Trailer
Another trailer but somewhat simpler than that just described is the
“Auto-Kamp” Trailer. The Auto-Kamp can be set up in a few minutes
and provides a tent 7 by 12 feet upon a frame that extends out from
the trailer when it is opened up. There are two windows with storm-
proof covers opened or closed from the inside. The beds simply fold
over on strong hinges, tent frame sets up in sockets, bed legs are
fitted with adjustable ends to take care of uneven ground so that beds
will be level. The beds are high and dry, each large enough for two
adults—size 48 by 76 inches, sagless bed springs and felt mattresses.
Four feather pillows are furnished. There is a curtain for dividing the
tent into two sections. A comfortable bed can be made up on the floor
of the trailer for children and cots may be placed under the beds for
extra members of the party. The body of the trailer is made of selected
woods securely ironed and braced. [52]The end gate is made to form a
convenient step when dropped. The floor is of matched lumber, put
together with white lead so as to exclude all dust on the road. The
axles are 1¼-inch solid drop-forged steel, fitted with automobile type
ball-bearing hubs. Standard 56-inch tread. Regular equipment is 30 by
3 pneumatic tires on artillery wheels. There is also standard equipment
of electric light outfit complete with wire and plug for attaching in any
socket on car, folding table, folding shelf, two burner gasoline stove
and electric tail light outfit, with dry battery.
[Contents]
Chenango Camp Trailer
Still another notable trailer, which is known as the “Chenango Camp

Trailer,” provides outdoor comfort with privacy. This is listed at
$375.00. In a very short time this trailer can be converted into a 10 by
14 foot bungalow with two comfortable bedrooms, a kitchen equipped
with a two-burner vapor stove and oven, encased in a fireproof
metallic cabinet with ventilator, refrigerator of fifty pounds ice capacity,
kitchen cabinet capable of carrying a week’s provisions for a party of
four, four large dust-proof clothes lockers, running water, electric
lights, dining-room seating six, which is a reading and recreation room
at night and all that one could desire in a 10 by 14 foot camp. The two
bedrooms, which are ventilated by screened glass windows adjustable
to any angle, contain each a double spring, [53]sagless bed with down
mattresses and are separated by a four-foot aisle. The bungalow has
9⅓-foot head room. Everything can be reached at a moment’s notice
and the entire outfit made ready for the road without any tiresome
packing in a few seconds. The trailer body is of hard wood tongued
and grooved and covered by 24-gauge sheet metal. The roof is made
of collapsible framework of quarter-inch steel tubing which by a simple
operation drops down into retaining sockets, allowing the sides of the
bungalow to fold up and the roof to collapse over all without disturbing
the contents of the bungalow. The trailer is supported on 30 by 3½
pneumatic tires and springs with roller bearings and demountable
rims. The weight is 850 pounds with equal carrying capacity. The axle
is of nickel steel with Timken roller bearings.
[Contents]
Tent Equipment
Many persons, however, do not find it feasible or desirable to have

either a convertible body or to own a land yacht for motor touring.
Others do not care to sleep in the car body, but prefer rather to pitch a
tent either in connection with the car, alongside, or near by. Such will
require something in the way of tenting equipment. In many aspects a
tent entirely separate from the car has its advantages. The car is then
simply parked near by and is available for side trips, journeys to
market, near-by sights, etc. [54]
As for tents, the variety available is well-nigh infinite, and at almost

any price from several dollars up. The humble pup-tent, or the army A
tent (so named from its shape) will serve very well for those who don’t
mind roughing it.
[Contents]
Tents Attached to the Car
Of tents attached to the car there are those that do not touch the
ground and others that have a ground attachment. Still others are
entirely separate from the car and form independent units. Some tents
use poles and others are supported entirely by ropes. Where tent
poles are used they are as a rule in sections for convenience in
packing.
[Contents]
Auto Bed Camp
Of sleeping tents that are attached to the roof of the car and extend
from its side without reaching the ground, save by the guy ropes and
the supporting frame, the Auto Bed Camp is a good example. These
tents come in units for two people, and are sufficiently rugged to
accommodate two large adults. The supporting frame is so constructed
as to increase the tension of the bed canvas in proportion to the
weight superimposed, thus preventing any sagging of the bed. The
bed is protected on all sides and screened windows admit sufficient air.
Such a tent bed is practically damp proof, as a tent [55]with a floor
cloth resting on the ground cannot be.
[Contents]
Tents Attaching to Car
There are many styles of tents that attach to the car, some of them
extremely ingenious in construction. Many of these tents use no poles,
but are supported by ropes that fasten to the top of the car. Some of
these tents are very simple and are little more than canopies, while
others are quite elaborate with sod cloths for the floor, side walls, flies,
and folding cots.
An inexpensive tent thus attaching to the side of the car by ropes that
go over the top, a tent having walls but using no poles, and having no
floor, may be bought as low as $7.50 for the 7 by 7 foot size, $6.50 for
size 5 by 7 feet. This tent can be set up either with or without the
auto. One has simply to throw the front flap over the car and fasten to
the wheels or stakes on the opposite side with guy ropes which are
furnished. To use without the car, with front flap closed, two 6½-foot
poles are required. This particular tent is styled a Double Service Moto-
tent.
[Contents]
How to Judge Weight of Canvas
It may be remarked in passing that in pricing tents on specifications

supplied by the manufacturers [56]it will be well to keep in mind this
information. The United States Government Standard yard of duck is
29 by 36 inches. A piece of canvas this size that weighs eight ounces is
the “U. S. Standard” eight-ounce duck. If it weighs ten ounces it is
U. S. Standard ten-ounce duck. Many manufacturers, jobbers and
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1. Educating in the Vernacular: The Foundations of Sister-Taught

3. A Space in Between Walls: Inside the Sister-Taught Public Classrooms

4. Captured!: POAU and the National Campaign against Captive

6. Sisters and the Trials of Separation 166

scholarly courtesy when he offered me his translation of Peter Küppers’

provide emotional support and a week’s worth of home-cooked meals. My father

taught by Catholic religious. For decades public–parochial institutions had pro-

First Amendment jurisprudence, the Court’s decisions inaugurated a generation of

visible population of Anglos—missionaries, artists, and fortune hunters—took up

Location of public-parochial school

Figure I.1 Religious-taught public schools in New Mexico c. 1948.

rightly anticipated might extend to all organized religious activity in public

life, from exchanges between Spanish-speaking residents and English-speaking offi-

reflected upon, and found to be either unduly aggressive or unduly threatened. No

for asserting a similar type of relationship. Their failure to do so on behalf of sisters,

problematic, by separation advocates, including those who took these women to

state’s Hispano residents. Spanish-speaking people represented a strong majority in

The Sisters . . . gave their elementary pupils instruction in orthography,

We must educate! We must educate! . . . If in our haste to be rich and

The American Camp Equipment Company makes a car bed which is

A convenient and inexpensive piece of equipment for a Ford car of any

Standing the Test of an 8,000 Mile Trip—Good Water Supply Everywhere—

One of the most interesting experiences in motor camping of which we

They encountered wind-storms and rain-storms, but their equipment

Two Army Cots the Basis

The Improvised Floor

Framework for the Tent

The exterior of the tent is similar to that of an ordinary tent in shape.

Dimensions of the Tent

Mosquito Netting Side Curtains

The bottom strip of the inner side-flaps referred to in the above

Along the ridge on the inside of the tent is secured a seven-inch-wide

It is advisable to make a waterproof bag in which to carry the tent.

The total outfit weighs under sixty pounds.

The Huntingtons carried this equipment in a two-compartment box on

The feature of the compartment described above is that the two

The Huntington compartment is covered with waterproof canvas

Motor Bungalows—Trailers—Tents: Those Extending from the Car; Those

In these days when the gypsy habit is being contracted by many

We give an illustration of a traveling bungalow built for a man

As one-third of human life is spent in sleep and a considerable portion

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