| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Danger on the Doorstep: Anti-Catholicism and American Print Culture in the Progressive Era. By Justin Nordstrom. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. x, 296 pp. Paper, $30.00, ISBN 978-0-268-03605-8.)

Justin Nordstrom analyzes the rise and fall of anti-Catholic nativist print culture in rural areas and small towns during the second decade of the twentieth century. Numerous publications, especially in the upper South and Midwest, deluged readers with largely fabricated or distorted information to prove the old charge that Catholicism was incompatible with American democracy. Subscribers devoured their regular doses of "ideological" (not ethnic or racial) nativist assaults on fellow citizens that most of them rarely knew or even saw. The familiar message: an observant Romanist could never be a good American, and the nation's survival as a democracy depended on accepting the fact of a Catholic conspiracy and acting on it. A secondary message was more insidious: elite urban Catholics and their minions in politics and industry were responsible for the diminished status and clout of small-town Protestant America.

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