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  • Danger on the Doorstep: Anti-Catholicism and American Print Culture in the Progressive Era
  • David L. Salvaterra
Danger on the Doorstep: Anti-Catholicism and American Print Culture in the Progressive Era. By Justin Nordstrom. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 2006. Pp. x, 296. $30.00 paperback.)

Focusing on a largely neglected era, the decade of the 1910's, Justin Nordstrom's analysis of anti-Catholicism renders it predominantly ideological in the sense that it was more about the incompatibility of Catholicism and Americanism than about ethnicity or religion.

Primary among its themes were nationalist and patriotic ones that portrayed Catholics as threatening, if not dangerous, to the republic. Secretive, possibly disloyal, manipulative, and corrupt, Catholics constituted a potential fifth column. Catholic philanthropy and social services were attacked as screens for greed or ways to harm the vulnerable; Catholic schools, convents, orphanages, [End Page 719] and other institutions, merely fronts for power and influence, if not dens of depravity. These themes, present in other eras of our past, were now put to more specifically ideological and nationalistic purposes.

In Nordstrom's view nativists were not merely narrow-minded ignoramuses; they were people caught in a web of social and economic changes they found threatening. The preservation of white, small-town America in the face of rapid urbanization and political fragility seemed to be the only way to retain their way of life.

He closely analyzes the language, images, techniques, and messages of anti-Catholic publications to demonstrate their appeal. Based in rural areas of the nation with small Catholic populations (chiefly the South and border states), The Yellow Jacket, Watson's Magazine, The Menace, and others relied on small-town patriotic and nationalistic attitudes. Muscular, male protective instincts were stimulated by typically progressive publicity and print culture techniques.

Once apprised of the truth of Catholic duplicity and depravity small-town patriotic manhood would be aroused to join together against supposed priest-and pope-ridden power, money, and perversion. The most innocent and helpless of all, women and children, required the protection of an awakened manhood aware of its precious political heritage and willing to fight to defend it.

Departing from the pattern of earlier episodes of anti-Catholicism, Catholics fought back. Catholic anti-nativists asserted their patriotism and American nationalism, exposed the lurid lies of the nativist press, called fellow Catholics and non-Catholics to fight their slanderous attacks, and they vindicated Catholic womanhood. The Knights of Columbus Commission on Religious Prejudices funded an extensive and costly campaign of counter-nativist propaganda and published extensive reports. It worked to prevent nativist publications from being sent through the U.S. mail on obscenity grounds and funded lawsuits against nativist publishers. This hurt the nativist bottom line, but World War I and Catholic war service did even more to silence the nativist press. Nordstrom makes clear that Catholics responded to an essentially ideological challenge in characteristically ideological ways as well as with print culture techniques similar to those of their adversaries. Catholic manhood and Catholic patriotism demanded print culture defenses.

While retaining a sharp analytical focus on the 1910's, Nordstrom connects the anti-Catholicism of that decade with earlier outbreaks (antebellum era, 1890's) and later ones (1920's, 1950's). He firmly establishes the surprising extent and popularity of nativism of the decade. He strongly connects it to many disparate strands of scholarship and convincingly explains its "hiatus" after World War I. Finally, Nordstrom acutely analyzes the Catholic counter-attack. An impressive monograph, its solidity is marred only by some relatively [End Page 720] minor proofreading errors (fig.5, p. 217 misidentifies Lincoln as Jefferson in a cartoon, Cardinal Gibbons is identified as being from New York rather than Baltimore, he uses "proscribed" when he means "prescribed" and uses "tact" when he means "tack").

David L. Salvaterra
Loras College
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