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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 103.3 | The History Cooperative
103.3  
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September, 2007
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Reviews

Danger on the Doorstep
Anti-Catholicism and American Print Culture in the Progressive Era

By Justin Nordstrom
(Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2006. Pp. ix, 296. Illustrations, appendix, notes, index. Paperbound, $30.00.)

Justin Nordstrom's analysis of anti- Catholic popular publications during the Progressive Era views this expression of nativism as a part of the ruralurban conflict that punctuated the period. The city, and Catholics who resided there, represented strange peoples and customs, sexual licentiousness, and lack of simplicity. Nativists grafted their movement onto progressivism and, working on the principle of guilt by association, sought to make Catholics scapegoats for modernity. In the South, where Catholics were rare, as they were in most rural areas, such anti-Catholicism was particularly intense. 1
      Anti-Catholicism was an ultranationalist variation on the American propensity to believe in conspiracy theories. Most threatening to this frame of mind was the idea that Catholics vested ultimate authority in a hierarchy whose epicenter lay abroad. American distrust of centralized power in any form, whether governmental or religious, had deep roots in the nation's history, dating back to the colonial period. Protestants were troubled by the doctrine of papal infallibility, which seemed undemocratic. Yet most charges were not original, nor were they specific to North America or limited to the time. They were as old as the Protestant Reformation— and they remain today, separating Protestantism and Catholicism. . . .
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