| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Justin Nordstrom. Danger on the Doorstep: Anti-Catholicism and American Print Culture in the Progressive Era. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. 2006. Pp. ix, 296. $30.00.
Anti-Catholicism has been a consistent part of the American experience throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and has therefore received considerable attention from historians. Justin Nordstrom, however, is the first to examine its print culture in the Progressive era, and in so doing he has made a significant contribution to the study of this ugly phenomenon.	1
Due to urban-based industrial growth, rural America by the early twentieth century was rapidly becoming marginalized, and loss of power and prestige produced an intense insecurity among its small-town populace. An outgrowth of this was a new wave of anti-Catholicism. Most U.S. Catholics were concentrated in major urban centers, and therefore they made convenient scapegoats for rural fears. By the second decade of the century, anti-Catholic weeklies with such ominous names as The Menace and The Peril had sprung up throughout the rural South and Midwest. They warned Protestants of a supposed Catholic plot to destroy American culture and values. Nativist journalists, spewing out a steady stream of lies and gross exaggerations, claimed that Catholics, following a carefully conceived plan of their bishops, were attempting to trick Protestants into thinking that they were harmless neighbors. Once Protestants were lulled into apathy, the American virtues of freedom, equality, and individualism would be replaced by papist despotism. This catastrophic outcome could be prevented, however, if true Americans understood what was happening. Thus, it was crucial that they subscribe to those periodicals that exposed the "Catholic menace." What is truly amazing is that during the 1910s, anti-Catholic periodicals reached a combined circulation of nearly two million. Yet the vast majority of their readers lived in rural areas where there were very few Catholics.	. . .

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