| Review | Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive era, 7.2

Book Reviews

Anti-Catholic Progressivism: The Nativist Press and Rural Bigotry in America

NORDSTROM, JUSTIN. Danger on the Doorstep: Anti-Catholicism and American Print Culture in the Progressive Era. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. ix + 296 pp. Introduction, appendix. $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-268-03605-8.

Justin Nordstrom has written an interesting and careful account of the anti-Catholic prejudice that returned with a marked virulence to the American cultural landscape during the Progressive Era. He argues that there was an outpouring of anti-Catholic literature during the period that included books, pamphlets, journals, and especially newspapers. The focus of his attention is on the nativist newspapers that pumped up and fanned anti-Catholic bigotry from 1910 to 1919. On the pages of these primarily rural broadsheets, anti-Catholic writers, cartoonists, editors, and publishers attacked Catholics as disloyal, backward-thinking, sinister conspirators whose subservience to clerical hierarchy threatened basic American liberties and democratic virtues. Throughout, Nordstrom nicely suffuses this study of anti-Catholic newspapers with a subtle appreciation for the currents and ambiguities of the larger Progressive Era culture in which they flourished.

Following an introduction, in five chapters, the author surveys and textually analyzes about ten anti-Catholic newspapers. The largest, the Menace, the focus of most of his analysis, reached over one-and-a-half-million readers each week, a circulation three times greater than the largest daily papers in Chicago and New York City combined. In the first chapter, Nordstrom argues that the anti-Catholic newspapers of the Progressive Era exhibited an "ideological nativism" that eschewed racialized or ethnic categorizations in favor of a bigotry that portrayed Catholics as incapable of abiding by the tenets of American society and culture. In the Progressive Era cultural context, patriotism, not race, was the issue at stake, and anti-Catholic writers repeatedly tried to discredit the Catholic Church for allegedly infiltrating and undermining the American republic.

In Chapter Two, Nordstrom argues that the anti-Catholicism of the Progressive Era had a rural character that distinguished it from the urban- based anti-Catholicism of previous periods. He also positions the anti- Catholicism of newspapers within the broader context of investigative journalism, arguing that nativist journalists shared with muckrakers the same faith in the power of information to redress social ills. Nativist texts argued that Catholics were responsible for the excesses of American modernity, including urban sprawl, corruption, graft, violence, and labor unrest. Nativist anti-Catholicism was, therefore, an attempt to preserve small-town, pastoral integrity in the face of dramatic social upheaval—a retreat, ultimately, from the modern world.

Chapter Three examines how anti-Catholic press coverage flourished within the Progressive Era codes of masculinity and childhood. The nativist press insisted that its Catholic opponents in hospitals, orphanages, and convents targeted the weakest members of society—women, the elderly, and children—for conversion or incarceration. Accordingly, fighting Catholicism and protecting the weak, whether Catholic or Protestant, required exertions of "masculine duty" and "muscular Christianity."

In Chapter Four, the author examines the vigorous denunciation of anti- Catholic bigotry by Catholic organizations, including the Knights of Columbus. In their own defense and to secure their legitimacy, Catholics relied on the same tropes of American masculinity, nationalist imagery, historical figures, and symbolic past as did the nativist press. The war of words carried out by Catholic writers and their opponents became a circular reappropriation of one another's texts as counterpropaganda. In the final chapter, Nordstrom explains that the United States' entry into World War I dissolved the anti-Catholic nativist movement. The war not only increased press production costs; the press also could not compete with the news of the war, which captured the attention of the American public. More important, the war gave Catholics the opportunity to prove that their loyalty to the nation was second to none.

The author is aware of the limitations of his source material. The run of newspapers and statistical data he examines are not always complete. The business records are not extant, nor are subscription lists. The locations and identities of subscribers cannot be ascertained and evaluated, and we, therefore, learn nothing about who the anti-Catholics were beyond a relatively narrow, if influential swath of newspaper writers, editors, and publishers. But these limitations are compounded by the author's reading of only ten newspapers, a short research span of less than ten years, and a rather traditional method. While the evidence and theme are thoroughly controlled, the reach of this book is therefore modest, and the results yield few surprises. One is left with the impression that the issues at stake may be more challenging than the conceptualization and the method allow. They beckon for more nuance, varied and deeper source material, and a more ambitious foray into cultural history, gender studies, and literary analysis. For example, the author argues that the anti-Catholic press attacked the Catholic Church for allegedly promoting the social ills of modernity. But it was also the case, and it remains unacknowledged in the study, that no other organization than the church itself more forcefully attacked modernity for its insidious secularism, shallow materialism, decadent entertainment, moral relativism, and social alienation. Thus in defending themselves against modernity, nativists were campaigning against those who were their allies. Of course, no one thinks that bigots are logical. The point is, rather, that an innovative exploration of precisely that paradox might have opened up the themes on a larger scale.

Unfortunately, there is no conclusion to the volume offering a final assessment that might have drawn some farther-reaching evaluation. The lack of a bibliography is also regrettable.

On its own terms, the book is a success. It is a contribution to the history of the Progressive Era and is necessary reading for anyone interested in that period. More largely, it is a contribution to the history of anti- Catholicism and anticlericalism, not just in the United States but globally, a topic rich with promise to illuminate important aspects of social, political, cultural, and sexual (dis)order. It is also a field that calls now for a "transnational history"—a history, given current historiographical trends and the state of scholarship on anti-Catholicism at the level of the nation-state, whose time has come.


	Michael B. Gross East Carolina University

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.